father still looked at me. 'He's very
like HER, father,' he said, in a husky voice.

I knew he meant my mother!

'Then you heard about poor Alice?' said my grandfather.

'Yes,' he said; 'it was a very curious thing. A man from these parts
happened to be on board the vessel I came home in, and he told me all
about it. I felt as if I had no heart left in me, when I heard she was
gone. I had just been thinking all the time how glad she would be to see
me.'

Then my grandfather told him all he could about my poor mother. How she
had longed to hear from him; and how, as week after week and month after
month went by, and no news came, she had gradually become weaker and
weaker. All this and much more he told him; and whenever he stopped, my
father always wanted to hear more, so that it was not until we were
sitting over the watchroom fire in the evening that my father began to
tell us his story.

He had been shipwrecked on the coast of China. The ship had gone to
pieces not far from shore, and he and three other men had escaped safely
to land. As soon as they stepped on shore, a crowd of Chinese gathered
round them with anything but friendly faces. They were taken prisoners,
and carried before some man who seemed to be the governor of that part
of the country. He asked them a great many questions, but they did not
understand a word of what he said, and, of course, could not answer him.

For some days my father and the other men were very uncertain what their
fate would be; for the Chinese at that time were exceedingly jealous of
any foreigner landing on their shore. However, one day they were brought
out of the wooden house in which they had been imprisoned, and taken a
long journey of some two hundred miles into the interior of the country.
And here it was that my poor father had been all those years, when we
thought him dead. He was not unkindly treated, and he taught the
half-civilized people there many things which they did not know, and
which they were very glad to learn. But both by day and night he was
carefully watched, lest he should make his escape, and he never found a
single opportunity of getting away from them. Of course, there were no
posts and no railways in that remote place, and he was quite shut out
from the world. Of what was going on at home he knew as little as if he
had been living in the moon.

Slowly and drearily eleven long years passed away, and then, one
morning, they were suddenly told tha