pe to receive as much as ten dollars for his
services, for the yacht might have been thrown upon the rocks and
utterly smashed, if he had not picked her up. Indeed, she was not three
miles from Deer Island when he discovered her, and in an hour or two
more nothing could have saved her from destruction.

To Little Bobtail ten dollars was a vast sum of money, and the very
first thought of obtaining it suggested, as the next one, the use to
which it should be applied. That old tub of a boat in which he had been
sailing all day could be bought for thirty dollars. It is true she was
not much of a boat; but it would afford Little Bobtail almost as much
pleasure to repair her and put a proper keel upon her, so that he could
beat to windward in her, as it would to sail her. Prince, who owned her,
would take ten dollars as the first payment, and in time he could earn
enough with her to pay the other twenty. Altogether the dream was a
brilliant one to him, and as he gazed through the gloom of the night at
the old tub, his fancy kindled with the glowing future. He wished the
old thing was bigger, so that he could have a cabin and a place to sleep
in her, when the drunken fury of Ezekiel drove him from the cottage.

Now, really, our hero did not think half so much of the janty yacht he
had captured as he did of the old tub, and we do not know that he would
have taken the trouble to enter her cabin before he wanted a place to
sleep, if he had not been hungry. Half a sheet of gingerbread and "half
a hunk of cheese" for supper were altogether insufficient for a growing
boy. If the party which had lost the yacht had been on a pleasure
excursion, of course they had brought provisions with them; for, to the
imagination of a boy of sixteen, eating is one of the chief pleasures of
existence, especially on the salt water. If the excursionists had gone
on shore,--as they must have done, since they were not on
board,--probably they had taken their provisions with them. It was a
startling thought; but then perhaps the yacht had broken adrift before
they were removed from the lockers. The alternative was very pleasant to
Little Bobtail, though it suggested the miserable condition of the
excursionists left on the island, perhaps to pass the night there,
without food. Our hero thought they could stand it better without any
supper than he could, for he had had only half a dinner, and besides,
everybody thinks his own misfortunes are infinitely mor