there.

I sat in my corner in the Brunswick Hotel, scowling at the floor, my
long legs thrust out, and my hands buried deep in my breeches pockets.
Presently, I was sensible that some one stood beside me, and looking
up, I beheld a young fellow staring with all his might, with a slow
grin of recognition wrinkling his face. I seemed to remember him.

"Mr. William Peploe, ain't it?" said he.

"Why yes," said I, "and you----and you----?"

"You don't remember Jem Back then, sir?"

"Yes I do, perfectly well. Sit down, Back. Are you a sailor? I am so
dead beat that I can scarcely talk."

Jem Back brought a tankard of ale to my table, and sat down beside me.
He was a youth of my own age, and I knew him as the son of a
parishioner of my father. He was attired in nautical clothes, yet
somehow he did not exactly look what is called a sailor man. We fell
into conversation. He informed me that he was an under-steward on
board a large ship called the "Huntress," that was bound out of the
Thames in a couple of days for Sydney, New South Wales. He had sailed
two years in her, and hoped to sign as head steward next voyage in a
smaller ship.

"There'll be a good deal of waiting this bout," said he; "we're taking
a cuddy full of swells out. There's Sir Thomas Mason--he goes as
Governor; there's his lady and three daughters, and a sort of suet" (he
meant suite) "sails along with the boiling." So he rattled on.

"Can't you help me to find a berth in that ship?" said I.

"I'm afraid not," he answered. "What could you offer yourself as, sir?
They wouldn't have you forward, and aft we're chock-a-block. If you
could manage to stow yourself away--they wouldn't chuck you overboard
when you turned up at sea; they'd make you useful and land you as safe
as if you was the Governor himself."

I thought this a very fine idea, and asked Back to tell me how I should
go to work to hide myself. He seemed to recoil, I thought, when I put
the matter to him earnestly, but he was an honest, kindly-hearted
fellow, and remembered my father with a certain degree of respect, and
even of affection; he had known me as a boy; there was the sympathy of
association and of memory between us; he looked at the old suit of
clothes I sat in, and at my hollow, anxious face, and he crooked his
eyebrows with an expression of pain when I told him that all the money
I had was two and a penny, and that I must starve and be found floating
a corpse in the