“What’s your name?” were the words he now heard shouted in his ear.

“Jonathan Briggs,” was his mumbled reply.  “I was blown off a ship’s deck in the gale last night.”

“What ship?”

“The Proserpine.”  It was the first name that suggested itself to him.

“Oh, I thought it might have been the Hesper; she foundered off here last night.”

“Foundered?  The Hesper?” The hot blood was shooting now through his veins.

“Yes, we just picked up her name-board.  That was before we got a hold on you.”

Foundered!  The ship from which he had been so mercilessly thrown!  And all on board lost, perhaps.  He began to realise the hand of Providence in his fate.

“It was the Hesper I sailed on.  I’m not just clear yet in my head.  My first voyage was made on the Proserpine.  Well, bless the gale that blew me from that deck!”

He seemed incoherent, and they left him again for a little while.  When they came back he had his story all ready, which imposed upon them just so far as it was for their interest.  Their business on this coast was not precisely legitimate, and when they found he simply wanted to be set on shore, they were quite willing to do thus much for him.  Only they regretted that he had barely two dollars and his own soaked clothing to give in exchange for the motley garments they trumped up among them for his present comfort.  But he, as well as they, made the best of a bad bargain, he especially, as his clothes, which would be soon scattered among half a dozen families, were the only remaining clew connecting him with his native town.  He could now be Jonathan Briggs indeed.  Only who was Jonathan Briggs, and how was he to earn a living under these unexpected conditions?

At the end of a couple of days he was dexterously landed on the end of a long pier, which they passed without stopping, on their way to their own obscure anchorage.  As he jumped from the rail to the pier and felt again the touch of terra firma he drew a long breath of uncontrollable elation.  Yet he had not a cent in the world, no friends, and certainly no prospects.  He did not even know whether to turn to the right or the left as he stepped out upon the docks, and when he had decided to turn to the right as being on the whole more lucky, he did not know whether to risk his fortune in the streets of the town or to plunge into one of the low-browed drinking houses whose signs confronted him on this water-lane.

He decided that his prospects for a dinner were slim in any case, and that his only hope of breaking fast that day lay in the use he might make of one of his three talents.  Either he must find a fiddle to play on, a carpenter’s bench to work at, or a piece of detective shadowing to do.  The last would bring him before the notice of the police, which was just the thing he must avoid; so it was fiddling or carpentry he must seek, either of which would be