nd no tact whatever, came bustling
out into the passage, and having shaken hands in a hearty fashion, told
him to put his hat on a nail and come in.

"No news of the cap'n, I suppose?" he asked, solemnly, after Fraser was
comfortably seated.

"Not a word," was the reply.

The dock-foreman sighed and shook his head as he reflected on the
instability of human affairs. "There's no certainty about anything," he
said, slowly. "Only yesterday I was walking down the Commercial Road,
and I slipped orf the curb into the road before you could say Jack
Robinson."

"Nearly run over?" queried Fraser.

Mr. Wheeler shook his head. "No," he said, quietly.

"Well, what of it?" enquired his son.

"It might just as well have been the edge of the dock as the curb;
that's what I mean," said Mr. Wheeler, with a gravity befitting his
narrow escape.

"I'm alwis telling you not to walk on the edge, father," said his wife,
uneasily.

The dock-foreman smiled faintly. "Dooty must be done," he said, in a
firm voice. "I'm quite prepared, my life's insured, and I'm on the club,
and some o' the children are getting big now, that's a comfort."

A feeling of depression settled on all present, and Augustus Wheeler,
aged eight, having gleaned from the conversation that his sire had
received instructions, which he intended promptly to obey, to fall
into the dock forthwith, suddenly opened his mouth and gave vent to his
affection and despair in a howl so terrible that the ornaments on the
mantelpiece shook with it.

"Don't scold 'im," said the dock-foreman, tenderly, as Mrs. Wheeler's
thin, shrill voice entered into angry competition with the howl; "never
mind, Gussie, my boy, never mind."

This gentleness had no effect, Gussie continuing to roar with much
ardour, but watching out of the corner of one tear-suffused eye the
efforts of his eldest sister to find her pocket.

"Hold your noise and I'll give you a ha'penny," she said, tartly.

Gussie caught his breath with a sob, but kept steam up, having on some
similar occasions been treated with more diplomacy than honesty. But
to-day he got the half-penny, together with a penny from the visitor,
and, having sold his concern in his father for three halfpence, gloated
triumphantly in a corner over his envious peers.

"Death," said Mr. Wheeler, slowly, after silence had been restored, "is
always sudden. The most sudden death I knew 'appened to a man who'd been
_dying_ for seven years. Nobody