ecover too?"

"No; not one of the three was alive when Captain Brown's ship came
across our boat. I was the only one who had any life remaining. They
thought me a corpse, too, and would have left me to die with the rest,
if it hadn't been for the captain, who declared there was breath still
in my apparently dead body, and kindly had me hoisted on board and
attended to."

"But how was it you never wrote home?" said Fritz after a bit, the
recollection of what he had gone through overcoming Eric and making him
silent for a moment.

"How could I, when the first land I touched, since I was picked up in
the ocean south of the Cape, was when I stepped ashore here last week!"

"I can't make that out," said Fritz, puzzled at this.

"Why," replied the other, "you must know that Captain Brown's ship, the
_Pilot's Bride_, is a whaling vessel; and she was on her usual cruise
for her fishing ground in the Southern Ocean, when I was rescued. If
there had been a boatload of us, or had our skipper been alive, perhaps
Captain Brown would have put in to the Cape to land us and so give news
of the loss of our ship; but, as there was only me, a boy, and I was for
days insensible and unable to give him any particulars about the vessel
I belonged to, of course he continued his voyage. When I came to
myself, he promised to put me on board the first home-going ship we met;
but, as we were far out of the track of these, we never came across a
sail. We did land at Tristan d'Acunha, about which I'll have to tell
you something bye-and-bye as to a plan I've got in my head, however, as
no vessel with the exception of ourselves had been there for six months,
there was not much use in my leaving a letter to be forwarded home, on
the chance of its being called for, was there?"

"No," said Fritz, laughing. "A bad sort of post office that!"

"So," continued Eric, "I had to wait till I landed here last Friday,
when I wrote at once to dear mother and you, whom I thought would of
course still be at Lubeck."

"Ah, you don't know all that has happened since you left," said Fritz
solemnly.

"Nothing is the matter with mother, dear mutterchen?" asked Eric in a
frightened voice.

"No; she's quite well, thank God," said Fritz, who then proceeded to
give his brother a history of all that had transpired in his absence--
the account taking all the longer from Eric's ignorance of the war and
everything connected with it, he not having seen a newspape