think I know the
explanation. My guide was not honest,--indeed, few of them are,--but,
strangely enough, I never discovered any dishonesty in him, while he was
with me. At that time, the postage on letters from that region was very
high, sometimes as much as fifty or sixty cents, or even a dollar. This,
of course, I always gave to the guide to use in sending the letter when
he got to the trading-post. Now, though the sum seems small to us, it
was large to him. And though I never suspected it at the time, I have no
doubt that he pocketed the money and simply destroyed the letters. So
that explains why my mother never received any of them.

"Well, I returned to California a rich man, able to indulge myself in
any form of amusement or adventure that pleased me. I found that I still
felt the lure of foreign countries, and the less explored or inhabited,
the better. I shipped for a voyage to Japan and China, and spent several
more years trying to penetrate the forbidden fastnesses of Tibet. From
there, I worked down through India, found my way to the South Sea
Islands, and landed at length in Australia with the intention of
penetrating farther into that continent than any white man had yet set
foot.

"I think by this time, I had pretty well lost all desire ever to return
to America, especially to New York. But at intervals I still felt an
inexpressible longing to see or hear from my mother. Ten or twelve added
years had slipped by, and it did not seem human that she should continue
to feel bitterly toward me. I had almost decided to write to her once
more, when in Sydney, New South Wales, where I happened to be looking
over the files of an old New York paper in the public library, I
stumbled on the death-notice of a Mrs. Fairfax Collingwood of
Chesterton, South Carolina. The paper was dated seven years before.

"The knowledge was like a knife-wound in my heart. There could be no
doubt of the truth. I knew of no other of that name, and the town was
the very one in which she lived. My mother now tells me that she knew of
this mistake, an error of the New York paper in copying the item from a
Southern journal. As a matter of fact, it was a very distant cousin of
hers who had died, a Mrs. Fanshawe Collingwood, who also lived in the
town. She was my mother's only living relative, and the paper mentioned
this circumstance. But when the New York paper copied it, they left out
all about the surviving cousin, and merely mentioned t