nd stay at home? Couldn't
you be a trolley-car conductor?"

"Well, maybe I could," said Freddie slowly. "But I'd rather be a sea
captain. Go on, Tommy. Tell us about your father."

"Well, I don't know much," went on Tommy Todd. "I don't remember him so
very well, you know. Then my grandmother and I lived alone. It was in a
better house than we have now, and we had more things to eat. I never
get enough now when I'm home, though when I was on the fresh air farm I
had lots," and, sighing, Tommy seemed sad.

"My father used to write letters to my grandmother--she is his mother,"
he explained. "When I got so I could understand, my grandmother read
them to me. My father wrote about his ship, and how he sailed away up
where the whales are. Sometimes he would send us money in the letters,
and then grandma would make a little party for me.

"But after a while no more letters came. My grandmother used to ask the
postman every day if he didn't have a letter for her from my father, but
there wasn't any. Then there was a piece in the paper about a ship that
was wrecked. It was my father's ship."

"What's wrecked?" asked Flossie.

"It means the ship is all smashed to pieces; doesn't it?" asked Freddie
of Tommy.

"That's it; yes. My father's ship was in a storm and was smashed on the
rocks. Everybody on it, and my father too, was drowned in the ocean, the
paper said. That's why I like the country better than the ocean."

"I used to like the ocean," said Flossie slowly. "We go down to Ocean
Cliff sometimes, where Uncle William and Aunt Emily and Cousin Dorothy
live. But I don't like the ocean so much now, if it made your father
drown."

"Oh, well, there have to be shipwrecks I s'pose," remarked Tommy. "But,
of course, it was awful hard to lose my father." He turned his head away
and seemed to be looking out of the window. Then he went on:

"After grandmother read that in the paper about my father's ship sinking
she cried, and I cried too. Then she wrote some letters to the company
that owned the ship. She thought maybe the papers were wrong, about the
ship sinking, but when the answers came back they said the same thing.
The men who owned the ship which my father was captain of, said the
vessel was lost and no one was saved. No more letters came from my
father, and no more money. Then grandmother and I had to move away from
the house where we were living, and had to go to a little house down by
the dumps. It isn't nice the