with us, and with the girl. If
that's what happened, he got what he deserved. People said the
next day that Mamie found it out as they reached the house, and
that her husband just walked out into the sea, and drowned
himself; and they would have blamed me for not stopping him if
they'd known that I was there. But I never told what I had seen,
for they wouldn't have believed me. I just let them think I had
come too late.

When I reached the cottage and lifted Mamie up, she was raving
mad. She got better afterwards, but she was never right in her
head again.

Oh, you want to know if they found Jack's body? I don't know
whether it was his, but I read in a paper at a Southern port
where I was with my new ship that two dead bodies had come ashore
in a gale down East, in pretty bad shape. They were locked
together, and one was a skeleton in oilskins.

* * * * *

Francis Marion Crawford, the youngest of the four
children of the well-known sculptor Thomas Crawford,
was born in Rome, educated by a French governess;
then at St Paul's School, Concord, N.H.; in the
quiet country village of Hatfield Regis, under an
English tutor; at Trinity College, Cambridge, where
they thought him a mathematician in those days; at
Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, and at the University of
Rome, where a special interest in Oriental languages
sent him to India with the idea of preparing for a
professorship.

At one time in India hard times nearly forced him
into enlistment in the British army, but a chance
opening sent him as editor of the _Indian Herald_ to
Allahabad. It was during the next eighteen months
that he met at Simla the hero of his first novel,
"Mr. Isaacs." "If it had not been for him," Mr.
Crawford has been known to say, "I might at this
moment be a professor of Sanskrit in some American
college;" for that idea persisted after his return
to the United States, where he entered Harvard for
special study of the subject.

But from the May evening when the story of the
interesting man at Simla was first told in a club
smoking-room overlooking Madison Square, Mr. Crawford's
life has been one of hard literary work. He returned to
Italy in 1883, spent most of the next year in
Constantinople, where he was married to a daughter
of General Berdan. From 1885 he has made his home in
Sorrento, Italy, visiting America at interv