boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of
the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an
irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged
tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up
by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for
an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark--hardly indeed any
room to exist.

He found it more difficult from year to year. He suffered greatly from
the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime
he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior cheroots
limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and
she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each
other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured
without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked
if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but
he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed two
hundred pounds.

He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look for a freight in
the Sofala's port of registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor
was that it was no use mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening
a boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged, were good. Good
enough, at any rate, to make her tell him frankly that with two hundred
pounds she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,
on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-chandler's runner, who
had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring. For the second time
in his life he was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door
with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house! Two
hundred pounds for a start! The only resource! And he did not know where