ostess answered, "I couldn't give you any this morning,"
in a tone that left no room for argument. He looked as if he had had a
great deal too much to drink already.

"How far do you call it from here to Boston?" he asked, and was told
that it was eighty miles.

"I'm a slow traveller," said he: "sailors don't take much to walking."
Miss Dane asked him if he had been a sailor. "Nothing else," replied
the man, who seemed much inclined to talk. He had been eating like a
hungry dog, as if he were half-starved,--a slouching, red-faced,
untidy-looking old man, with some traces of former good looks still to
be discovered in his face. "Nothing else. I ran away to sea when I was
a boy, and I followed it until I got so old they wouldn't ship me even
for cook." There was something in his being for once so
comfortable--perhaps it was being with a lady like Miss Dane, who
pitied him--that lifted his thoughts a little from their usual low
level. "It's drink that's been the ruin of me," said he. "I ought to
have been somebody. I was nobody's fool when I was young. I got to be
mate of a first-rate ship, and there was some talk o' my being captain
before long. She was lost that voyage, and three of us were all that
was saved; we got picked up by a Chinese junk. She had the plague
aboard of her, and my mates died of it, and I was sick. It was a hell
of a place to be in. When I got ashore I shipped on an old bark that
pretended to be coming round the Cape, and she turned out to be a
pirate. I just went to the dogs, and I've been from bad to worse ever
since."

"It's never too late to mend," said Melissa, who came into the kitchen
just then for a string to tie the chickens.

"Lord help us, yes, it is!" said the sailor. "It's easy for you to say
that. I'm too old. I ain't been master of this craft for a good
while." And he laughed at his melancholy joke.

"Don't say that," said Miss Dane.

"Well, now, what could an old wrack like me do to earn a living? and
who'd want me if I could? You wouldn't. I don't know when I've been
treated so decent as this before. I'm all broke down." But his tone
was no longer sincere; he had fallen back on his profession of beggar.

"Couldn't you get into some asylum or--there's the Sailors' Snug
Harbor, isn't that for men like you? It seems such a pity for a man of
your years to be homeless and a wanderer. Haven't you any friends at
all?" And here, suddenly, Miss Dane's face altered, and she grew very