could have got on without him," he used to say later on, "but there's
the business. And he an only son, too!" His mother wept very much after
his disappearance. As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind,
he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letter
arrived from Talcahuano. It was short, and contained the statement:
"We had very fine weather on our passage out." But evidently, in the
writer's mind, the only important intelligence was to the effect that
his captain had, on the very day of writing, entered him regularly on
the ship's articles as Ordinary Seaman. "Because I can do the work," he
explained. The mother again wept copiously, while the remark, "Tom's an
ass," expressed the emotions of the father. He was a corpulent man, with
a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised
in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a
half-witted person.

MacWhirr's visits to his home were necessarily rare, and in the course
of years he despatched other letters to his parents, informing them of
his successive promotions and of his movements upon the vast earth. In
these missives could be found sentences like this: "The heat here is
very great." Or: "On Christmas day at 4 P. M. we fell in with some
icebergs." The old people ultimately became acquainted with a good
many names of ships, and with the names of the skippers who commanded
them--with the names of Scots and English shipowners--with the names
of seas, oceans, straits, promontories--with outlandish names of
lumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports--with the names of
islands--with the name of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy.
It did not suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the name
pretty. And then they died.

The great day of MacWhirr's marriage came in due course, following