a Dutch gunboat. Most of
the time on the island we spent debating how Lobelia come to be on the
schooner. Finally we decided that she must have gone aboard to sleep
that night, suspecting that we'd try to run away in the schooner just as
we had tried to. We talked about Whiskers and his crew and guessed about
how they came to abandon their boat in the first place. One thing we was
sartin sure of, and that was that they'd left Lobelia aboard on purpose.
We knew mighty well that's what we'd a-done.

"What puzzled us most was what relation Lobelia was to the skipper. She
wa'n't his wife, 'cause he'd said so, and she didn't look enough like
him to be his mother or sister. But as we was being took off in the
Dutchman's yawl, Hammond thumps the thwart with his fist and says he:

"'I've got it!' he says; 'she's 'is mother-in-law!'

"''Course she is!' says I. 'We might have known it!'"

THE MEANNESS OF ROSY

Cap'n Jonadab said that the South Seas and them islands was full of
queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that
Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a Cockney in that yarn, too, and
a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other respects the stories was
different.

"You all know Wash Sparrow, here in Wellmouth," says the Cap'n. "He's
the laziest man in town. It runs in his family. His dad was just the
same. The old man died of creeping paralysis, which was just the disease
he'd pick out TO die of, and even then he took six years to do it in.
Washy's brother Jule, Julius Caesar Sparrow, he was as no-account and
lazy as the rest. When he was around this neighborhood he put in his
time swapping sea lies for heat from the post-office stove, and the only
thing that would get him livened up at all was the mention of a feller
named 'Rosy' that he knew while he was seafaring, way off on t'other
side of the world. Jule used to say that 'twas this Rosy that made him
lose faith in human nature.

"The first time ever Julius and Rosy met was one afternoon just as the
Emily--that was the little fore-and-aft South Sea trading schooner Jule
was in--was casting off from the ramshackle landing at Hello Island.
Where's Hello Island? Well, I'll tell you. When you get home you take
your boy's geography book and find the map of the world. About amidships
of the sou'western quarter of it you'll see a place where the Pacific
Ocean is all broke out with the measles. Yes; well, one of them measle
spots i