hero of a night of undoubted energy and
courage had blotted it out in a single moment of native vanity and
vulgar avarice.

He was gone; not only two hours, but daylight had come and they
were eagerly seeking him, when he returned among them, dripping
and--empty-handed. He had reached the ship, he said, with another; found
the box, and trusted himself alone with it to the sea. But in the surf
he had to abandon it to save himself. It had perhaps drifted ashore, and
might be found; for himself, he abandoned his claim to the reward. Had
he looked abashed or mortified, Jenny felt that she might have relented,
but the braggart was as all-satisfied, as confident and boastful as
ever. Nevertheless, as his eye seemed to seek hers, she was constrained,
in mere politeness, to add her own to her father's condolences. "I
suppose," she hesitated, in passing him, "that this is a mere nothing
to you after all that you did last night that was really great and
unselfish."

"Were you never disappointed, Miss?" he said, with exasperating
abruptness.

A quick consciousness of her own thankless labor on the galleon, and
a terrible idea that he might have some suspicion of, and perhaps the
least suggestion that she might have been disappointed in him, brought a
faint color to her cheek. But she replied with dignity:--

"I really couldn't say. But certainly," she added, with a new-found
pertness, "you don't look it."

"Nor do you, Miss," was his idiotic answer.

A few hours later, alarmed at what she had heard of the inroads of the
sea, which had risen higher than ever known to the oldest settler, and
perhaps mindful of yesterday's footprints, she sought her old secluded
haunt. The wreck was still there, but the sea had reached it. The
excavation between its gaunt ribs was filled with drift and the seaweed
carried there by the surges and entrapped in its meshes. And there, too,
caught as in a net, lay the wooden box of securities Sol. Catlin had
abandoned to the sea.

This is the story as it was told to me. The singularity of coincidences
has challenged some speculation. Jenny insisted at the time upon sharing
the full reward with Catlin, but local critics have pointed out that
from subsequent events this proved nothing. For she had married him!

OUT OF A PIONEER'S TRUNK.

It was a slightly cynical, but fairly good-humored crowd that had
gathered before a warehouse on Long Wharf in San Francisco one afternoon
in the summe