in the
universe that puzzled him.

While these thrilling events and hairbreadth escapes had been taking
place, while the doomed _Star_ was being saved to twinkle for another
week, the all-unconscious Captain had been sitting at his desk rumbling
and grumbling as he opened the exchanges. This was an occupation he
affected greatly to despise, but which he would not have given over for
the world. By the time he had read about a dozen of his esteemed
contemporaries he was usually in a condition in which he could, as he
himself put it, "wield a pungent pen." He had arrived at that nefarious
sheet, the Sterling _Democrat_, and was leaning back in his chair
reading the utterly preposterous lucubrations of Brother Kendrick, which
he always saved to the last to give a final fillip to his spirits.
Suddenly he dashed the paper aside, sat up straight, and cried out with
tremendous vigour:

"Fudge!"

It was glorious; it came quite up to my highest expectations. But
somehow, at that moment, it was enough for me to see and hear the
Captain, without getting any better acquainted. I wasn't sure, indeed,
that I cared to know him at all. I didn't like his new pipe--which shows
how little I then understood the Captain!

As I was going out, for even the most interesting incidents must have an
end, I stepped over and said to Anthy in a low voice:

"I'll see that you get the address of--my uncle in California."

[Illustration]

CHAPTER III

ANTHY

It is one of the strange things in our lives--interesting, too--what
tricks our early memories play us. What castles in fairyland they build
for us, what never-never ships they send to sea! To a single flaming
incident imprinted upon our consciousness by the swift shutter of the
soul of youth they add a little of that-which-we-have-heard-told, spice
it with a bit of that-which-would-be-beautiful-if-it-could-have-happened,
and throw in a rosy dream or two--and the compound, well warmed in the
fecund soil of the childish imagination, becomes far more real and
attractive to us than the drab incidents of our grown-up yesterdays.

Long afterward, when we had become much better acquainted, Anthy told me
one day, very quietly, of the greatest memory of her childhood. It was
of something that never could have happened at all; and yet, to Anthy,
it was one of the treasured realities of her life, a memory to live by.

She was standing at the bedside of her mother. She remembered, she sa