“I knew by the row on the stairs you’d brought her home,” he exclaimed, as Little Kensington was snatched from him and Corinne was put into his arms.

We left Jonas and Pomona to their wild delight, and I accompanied the equally happy lady to the opera house, where I took occasion to reclaim the wraps which we had left behind in our sudden flight.

When the police of Paris were told to give up their search for an absconding nurse accompanied by a child, and to look for one without such encumbrance, they found her.  From this woman was obtained much of the story I have told, and a good deal more was drawn out, little by little, from Corinne, who took especial pleasure in telling, in brief sentences, how she had ousted the lazy baby from the carriage, and how she had scratched her own legs in getting in.

“What I’m proud of,” said Pomona, “is that she did it all herself.  It wasn’t none of your common stealin’s an’ findin’s; an’ it aint everywhere you’ll see a child that kin git itself lost back of Prince Albert’s monnyment, an’ git itself found at the operer in Paris, an’ attend to both ends of the case itself.  An’, after all, them two high notes of hern was more good than Perkins’s Indelible Dab.”

DERELICT.

A TALE OF THE WAYWARD SEA.

I.

On the 25th of May, 1887, I sat alone upon the deck of the Sparhawk, a three-masted schooner, built, according to a description in the cabin, at Sackport, Me.  I was not only alone on the deck, but I was alone on the ship.  The Sparhawk was a “derelict”; that is, if a vessel with a man on board of her can be said to be totally abandoned.

I had now been on board the schooner for eight days.  How long before that she had been drifting about at the mercy of the winds and currents I did not then know, but I discovered afterward that during a cyclone early in April she had been abandoned by her entire crew, and had since been reported five times to the hydrographic office of the Navy Department in Washington, and her positions and probable courses duly marked on the pilot chart.

She had now become one of that little fleet abandoned at sea for one cause or another, and floating about this way and that, as the wild winds blew or the ocean currents ran.  Voyaging without purpose, as if manned by the spirits of ignorant landsmen, sometimes backward and forward over comparatively small ocean spaces, and sometimes drifting for many months and over thousands of miles, these derelicts form, at night and in fog, one of the dangers most to be feared by those who sail upon the sea.

As I said before, I came on board the abandoned Sparhawk on the 17th of May, and very glad indeed was I to get my feet again on solid planking.  Three days previously the small steamer Thespia, from Havana to New York, on which I had been a passenger, had been burned at sea, and all on board had left her in the boats.