little brothers. Then, a few miles off, I saw the first vessel that
had come to our eyes since we had sunk the headlands of California
more than a week before. She was a great sailing ship, under a cloud
of snowy canvas, one of the caste of clippers that fast fades under
the pall of smoke, and, from her route, bound for the Pacific Coast
from Australia. The captain of the Noa-Noa came and stood beside me
as we made her out more plainly, and fetching the glasses, he glanced
at her, started, and said in some surprise:

"She 's signaling us she wants to send a boat to us. That's the first
time in thirty years in this line I have ever had such a request from
a wind-jammer. She left her slant to cross our path."

Half a mile away a beautiful, living creature, all quivering with
the restraint, she came up into the eye of the wind, and backed
her fore-yard. A boat put off from her, and we awaited it with
indefinable alarm. It was soon at the gangway we had hastily lowered,
unknowing whether woman or child might not be our visitor. It was
a young Russian sailor whose hand had been crushed under a block a
fortnight before, and who, without aid for his injury other than the
simple remedies that make up the pharmacopoeia of sailing vessels,
was like to die from blood-poisoning. Had our ship not been met, he
would undoubtedly have perished, for no other steamer came to these
points upon the chart, and, as we were to learn, his own ship did
not reach her port for many weeks. He was a mere boy, his face was
drawn with continued pain, but, with the strong repression of emotion
characteristic of the sailor, he uttered no sound. The passengers,
relieved from silent fears of any catastrophe aboard the sailing ship,
and perhaps salving their souls for fancied failure toward the drowned
Leung Kai Chu, crowded to fill the boat with books, fruit, and candy,