“I leave you to guess the wretchedness as fell upon me, for I’ve not got the gift to tell you.  There I was down on the ship’s books for a three years’ viage, an’ no help for it.  I feel nigh to six hundred years old when I think how long that viage was.  There isn’t no hour-glass as runs slow enough to keep a tally of the slowness of them fust hours.  But I done my duty like a man, seem’ there wasn’t no way of gettin’ out of it.  I told my shipmates of the trick as had been played on me, an they tried to cheer me up a bit; but I was sore sorrowful for a long spell.  Many a night on watch I put my face in my hands and sobbed for thinkin’ of the little woman left among the land-sharks, an’ no man to have an eye on her, God bless her!”

Here Kitty softly drew her chair nearer to Sailor Ben, and rested one hand on his arm.

“Our adventures among the whales, I take it, doesn’t consarn the present company here assembled.  So I give that the go by.  There’s an end to everythin’, even to a whalin’ viage.  My heart all but choked me the day we put into New Bedford with our cargo of ile.  I got my three years’ pay in a lump, an’ made for New York like a flash of lightnin’.  The people hove to and looked at me, as I rushed through the streets like a madman, until I came to the spot where the lodgin’-house stood on West Street.  But, Lord love ye, there wasn’t no sech lodgin’-house there, but a great new brick shop.

“I made bold to go in an’ ask arter the old place, but nobody knowed nothin’ about it, save as it had been torn down two years or more.  I was adrift now, for I had reckoned all them days and nights on gittin’ word of Kitty from Dan Shackford, the man as kept the lodgin’.

“As I stood there with all the wind knocked out of my sails, the idee of runnin’ alongside the perlice-station popped into my head.  The perlice was likely to know the latitude of a man like Dan Shackford, who wasn’t over an’ above respecktible.  They did know—­he had died in the Tombs jail that day twelvemonth.  A coincydunce, wasn’t it?  I was ready to drop when they told me this; howsomever, I bore up an’ give the chief a notion of the fix I was in.  He writ a notice which I put into the newspapers every day for three months; but nothin’ come of it.  I cruised over the city week in and week out I went to every sort of place where they hired women hands; I didn’t leave a think undone that a uneddicated man could do.  But nothin’ come of it.  I don’t believe there was a wretcheder soul in that big city of wretchedness than me.  Sometimes I wanted to lay down in the sheets and die.

“Drif tin’ disconsolate one day among the shippin’, who should I overhaul but the identical smooth-spoken chap with a white hat an’ a weed on it!  I didn’t know if there was any spent left in me, till I clapped eye on his very onpleasant countenance.  ‘You villain!’ sez I, ‘where’s my little Irish lass as you dragged me away from?’ an’ I lighted on him, hat and all, like that!”