we can be good girls all the same if we are happy, can't we?"

"No, sir!" said injured Moppet. "You don't catch me!"

"But O Moppet, see the round drops hanging and burning on the blinds!
And how the little mud-puddles shine, Moppet!"

Out of her pain and her patience God had brought her beautiful answer.
It was well for Sharley. But if such answer had not come? That also
would have been well.

Kentucky's Ghost.

True? Every syllable.

That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman,
but I'll bet you a doughnut I can beat it; and all on the square, too,
as I say,--which is more, if I don't mistake, than you could take oath
to. Not to say that I never stretched my yarn a little on the fo'castle
in my younger days, like the rest of 'em; but what with living under
roofs so long past, and a call from the parson regular in strawberry
time, and having to do the flogging consequent on the inakkeracies of
statement follering on the growing up of six boys, a man learns to trim
his words a little, Tom, and no mistake. It's very much as it is with
the talk of the sea growing strange to you from hearing nothing but
lubbers who don't know a mizzen-mast from a church-steeple.

It was somewhere about twenty years ago last October, if I recollect
fair, that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar.
I've done that little voyage to Madagascar when the sea was like so much
burning oil, and the sky like so much burning brass, and the fo'castle
as nigh a hell as ever fo'castle was in a calm; I've done it when we
came sneaking into port with nigh about every spar gone and pumps going
night and day; and I've done it with a drunken captain on starvation
rations,--duff that a dog on land wouldn't have touched and two
teaspoonfuls of water to the day,--but someways or other, of all the
times we headed for the East Shore I don't seem to remember any quite as
distinct as this.

We cleared from Long Wharf in the ship Madonna,--which they tell me
means, My Lady, and a pretty name it was; it was apt to give me that
gentle kind of feeling when I spoke it, which is surprising when you
consider what a dull old hull she was, never logging over ten knots, and
uncertain at that. It may have been because of Moll's coming down once
in a while in the days that we lay at dock, bringing the boy with her,
and sitting up on deck in a little white apron, knitting. She was a very
good-looking woman, was my