e. Let me conclude by urging you to bring poor Leather home,
strong and well. Tell him from me that there is a vacant situation in
the firm of Withers and Company which will just suit him. He shall
have it when he returns--if God spares me to see him again. But I'm
getting old, Charlie, and we know not what a day may bring forth."

"A kind--a very kind letter," said Leather earnestly, when his friend
had finished reading.

"Why, he writes as if he were your own father, Brooke," remarked Buck
Tom, who had been listening intently. "Have you known him long?"

"Not long. Only since the time that he gave me the appointment of
supercargo to the _Walrus_, but the little I have seen of him has
aroused in me a feeling of strong regard."

"My sister May refers to him here," said Leather, with a peculiar smile,
as he re-opened his letter. "The greater part of this tells chiefly of
private affairs which would not interest any of you, but here is a
passage which forms a sort of commentary on what you have just heard:--

"`You will be amused to hear,' she writes, `that good Captain Stride
has come to live in Sealford. Kind old Mr Crossley has given him
some sort of work connected with Withers and Company's house which I
can neither understand nor describe. Indeed, I am convinced it is
merely work got up on purpose by Mr Crossley as an excuse for giving
his old friend a salary, for he knows that Captain Stride would be
terribly cast down if offered a _pension_, as that would be equivalent
to pronouncing him unfit for further duty, and the Captain will never
admit himself to be in that condition till he is dying. Old Jacob
Crossley--as you used to call him--thinks himself a very sagacious and
"deep" man, but in truth there never was a simpler or more transparent
one. He thinks that we know nothing about who it is that sends the
old lady to buy up all the worsted-work that mother makes, but we know
perfectly well that it is himself, and dear mother could never have
gone on working with satisfaction and receiving the money for it all
if we had not found out that he buys it for our fishermen, who are
said really to be very much in need of the things she makes.

"`The dear old man is always doing something kind and considerate in a
sly way, under the impression that nobody notices. He little knows
the power of woman's observation! By the way, that reminds me that he
is not