gs.

"No, nor won't as long as this chile draws breath nether," answered the
ex-mate of the _Susan Jane_, feelingly, with a look of almost parental
fondness at the boy.

"Mr Wilton here was wondering, Seth," continued Mr Rawlings, "why you
would not let me open that package round poor Sailor Bill's neck, to see
whether it would give us any clue to who he is."

The smile faded instantly from Seth Allport's face, which reassumed its
normal grim, firm look, just as if some one had dealt him what he would
have called a "back-hander."

"Mr Wilton may wonder, and you too, Mr Rawlings, but I jest won't
that, siree, not if I know it. Nary a soul shall look upon it, I guess,
till that thar b'y opens it hisself. I said that months agone,
Rawlings, as you knows well, and I say it now agin."

"I wish I could recollect whom he resembles, really," said Ernest
Wilton, to give a turn to the conversation, which had got into such an
unpleasant hitch. "There is nothing so worrying as to try and puzzle
over a face which you seem to remember and which you cannot place."

"Yes," said Mr Rawlings; "like a name sometimes seems to hover right on
the tip of your tongue, and yet you can't get it out, try what you may.
I suppose you left England only lately?"

"I?" replied the young engineer. "Why, it's nearly four years since I
left Liverpool for America--quite."

"Perhaps you keep up communication, however, with the tight little
island, eh?" said Mr Rawlings. "I daresay some one was sorry to lose
you."

"Not they," said Ernest Wilton carelessly. "`I care for nobody, no, not
I, and nobody cares for me,'" he hummed in a rich baritone voice,
although there was a tone of sadness in it that belied the tenor of the
words. "I assure you," he added presently, in one of those sudden
bursts of confidence in which some of us are apt to indulge sometimes
when we get a sympathetic listener, "that I haven't written home or
heard from thence for more than three years, and they will have thought
me dead by this time! I've no doubt there is a large parcel of letters
and papers awaiting me now in New York, where I told them to address me
when I came to America; for I've not been back there either since the
day I landed, when I started straight across the continent for
California, with a gentleman who had an interest in some mines there,
with whom I came over in the same steamer from Liverpool; and I have
never been eastwards again, or turned my