his letter was a
photograph of a family group--a be-whiskered man of thirty-five, a
good-looking woman of twenty, but undoubtedly a Mexican, and a
curly-headed baby, perhaps a year old. The letter ran:

"City of Mexico, July 21, 1890.

"DEAR OLD JOHN: I had lost you, and thought that perhaps you had
gone over to the majority, until I saw your name and recognized
your quill in a story. Write to me; am doing well. I send you a
photograph of all there are of the Howell outfit. _No half-breeds
for your uncle this time._

"WM. HOWELL."

THE POLAR ZONE

Very few of my friends know me for a seafaring man, but I sailed the
salt seas, man and boy, for nine months and eighteen days, and I know
just as much about sailing the hereinbefore mentioned salt seas as I
ever want to.

Ever so long ago, when I was young and tender, I used to have fits of
wanting to go into business for myself. Along about the front edge of
the seventies, pay for "toting" people and truck over the eastern
railroads of New England was not of sufficient plenitude to worry a man
as to how he would invest his pay check--it was usually invested before
he got it. One of my periodical fits of wanting to go into business for
myself came on suddenly one day, when I got home and found another baby
in the house. I was right in the very worst spasms of it when my
brother Enoch, whom I hadn't seen for seventeen years, walked in on me.

Enoch was fool enough to run away to sea when he was twelve years old--I
suppose he was afraid he would get the chance to do something besides
whaling. We were born down New Bedford way, where another boy and myself
were the only two fellows in the district, for over forty years, who
didn't go hunting whales, icebergs, foul smells, and scurvy, up in King
Frost's bailiwick, just south of the Pole.

Enoch had been captain and part owner of a Pacific whaler; she had
recently burned at Honolulu, and he was back home now to buy a new ship.
He had heard that I, his little brother John, was the best locomotive
engineer in the whole world, and had come to see me--partly on account
of relationship, but more to get my advice about buying a steam
whaling-ship. Enoch knew more about whales and ships and such things
than you could put down in a book, but he had no more idea _how_ steam
propelled a ship than I had what a "skivvie tricer" was.

Well, before the week was out, Enoch showed me that he w