of the _Cachalot_ published this year.

DENISON'S SECOND BERTH ASHORE

I have already told how Tom Denison, the South Sea Island supercargo,
took a berth ashore as overseer of a Queensland duck farm, which
was mortgaged to a bank of which his brother was manager, and how he
resigned the post in great despondency, and humped his swag to Cooktown.

Over his meeting with his brother let a veil be drawn. Suffice it to say
that the banker told him that he had missed the one great chance of his
life, and quoted Scripture about the ways of the improvident man to such
an extent that Denison forgot himself, and said that the bank and its
infernal ducks could go and be damned. Thereupon his sister-in-law (who
was a clergyman's daughter, and revered the Bank as she did the Church)
swooned, and his brother told him he was a heartless and dissolute young
ruffian, who would come to a bad end. Feeling very hurt and indignant,
the ex-supercargo stumped out of the bank, and went down to the wharf to
look for a ship.

But there was only a dirty little coasting steamer in port, and Denison
hated steamers, for once he had had to go a voyage in one as supercargo,
and the continuous work involved by being constantly in port every few
days, instead of drifting about in a calm, all but broke his heart.
So he rented a room at a diggers' boarding-house kept by a Chinaman,
knowing that this would be a dagger in the heart of his sister-in-law,
who was the leading lady in Cooktown society; also, he walked about the
town without a coat, and then took a job on the wharf discharging coals
from a collier, and experienced a malevolent satisfaction when he one
evening met Mrs Aubrey Denison in the street. He was in company with
four other coal-heavers, all as black as himself; his sister-in-law was
walking with the wife of the newly-appointed Supreme Court judge. She
glanced shudderingly at the disgraceful sight her relative presented,
went home and hysterically suggested to Aubrey Denison, Esq., that his
brother Tom was a degraded criminal, and was on the way to well-deserved
penal servitude.

After the coal-heaving job was finished, Denison lay back and luxuriated
on the L5, 17s. 6d. he had earned for his week's toil. Then one morning
he saw an advertisement, in the _North Queensland Trumpet-Call_, for a
proof-reader. And being possessed of a certain amount of worldly wisdom,
he went down to the bank, saw his brother (who received him with a