three days."

Here he paused; and, without glancing at Miss Raglan, who sat very still,
but looking at him, he lighted his cigar.

"Then things got worse. My father took to drinking hard, and we had
mighty little to eat. I chored around, doing odd things in the village. I
have often wondered that people didn't see the stuff that was in me, and
give me a chance. They didn't, though. As for my relatives: one was a
harness-maker. He sent me out in the dead of winter to post bills for
miles about, and gave me ten cents for it. Didn't even give me a meal.
Twenty years after he came to me and wanted to borrow a hundred dollars.
I gave him five hundred on condition that he'd not come near me for the
rest of his natural life.

"The next thing I did was to leave home--'run away,' I suppose, is the
way to put it. I got to Boston, and went for a cabin-boy on a steamer;
travelled down to Panama, and from there to Brazil. At Brazil I got on
another ship, and came round to San Francisco. I got into trouble in San
Francisco with the chief mate of the Flying Polly, because I tried to
teach him his business. One of the first things I learned in life was not
to interfere with people who had a trade and didn't understand it. In San
Francisco I got out of the situation. I took to selling newspapers in the
streets.

"There wasn't enough money in it. I went for a cabin-boy again, and
travelled to Australia. There, once more, I resigned my position, chiefly
because I wouldn't cheerfully let the Mate bang me about the
quarter-deck. I expect I was a precocious youth, and wasn't exactly the
kind for Sunday-school prizes. In Melbourne I began to speculate. I found