THE LITTLE SAILOR BOY.


The story I told you about the Indian girl makes me think of a little
boy that we once had in our ship. He was a very good boy. The captain
liked him very much. He was not the captain's child. But the captain
used to say that he loved little George as much as if he was his child.
The reason the captain loved him, and the reason everybody loved him,
was because he was so kind and so good natured, and because he always
did just as he was told to do.

I must tell you how George first came to live with us in the ship. We
were once a great many hundred miles off, and the wind blew very
hard. It blew so hard that we could not sail where we wanted to go,
and by and by the ship went upon a bank of sand. There we had to stay
a good while. We could not get away. Nobody was drowned. We ought to
have been very thankful for that. I hope we were thankful. While we
were lying on the sand bank, the waves dashed against the ship so
hard, that we were afraid it would break in pieces. We did not know
what to do. Some of us thought we might as well jump into the water,
and try to swim to the shore. But the captain said that we should
certainly get drowned if we tried to do that.

You wonder why we did not get into our boat, and row to the shore. We
should have done so if we had not lost our boat. But we had no boat.
The waves had dashed against it, and tore it away from the place where