I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.

"Oh, I know him!" I cried wildly. "It's my father! My father!"

Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This
rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly
hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.

At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the
table before me.

"Tell me all about him," I murmured, sobbing. "For, Jack, I remember
now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him--I loved him."

Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me.
The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person
in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had
none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a
shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and
on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a
man of education, position, reputation, fortune.

Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this
curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed
in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a
remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose
palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock,
away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the
Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man