“Come out o’ this,” cried the mate, jerking him forward. With a wrench the stowaway tore himself free and made a dash for the companion way. A couple of sailors instantly tripped him up. “Let go of me; I’m a cabin passenger,” cried Cupples. “Bless me!” I cried in astonishment. “This isn’t you, Cupples? Why, I acted on your own advice and that of Revised Statutes, No. what ever-they-were.” “Well, act on my advice again,” cried the infuriated Cupples, “and go to—the hold.” However, he was better in humour the next day, and stood treat all round. We found, subsequently, that Cupples was a New York actor, and at the entertainment given for the benefit of the sailors’ orphans, a few nights after, he recited a piece in costume that just melted the ladies. It was voted a wonderfully touching performance, and he called it “The Stowaway.” The Purser’s Story “O Mother-nature, kind in touch and tone. Act as we may, thou clearest to thine own.” I don’t know that I should tell this story. When the purser related it to me I know it was his intention to write it out for a magazine. In fact he _had_ written it, and I understand that a noted American magazine had offered to publish it, but I have watched that magazine for over three years and I have not yet seen the purser’s story in it. I am sorry that I did not write the story at the time; then perhaps I should have caught the exquisite peculiarities of the purser’s way of telling it. I find myself gradually forgetting the story and I write it now in case I _shall_ forget it, and then be harassed all through after life by the remembrance of the forgetting. There is no position more painful and tormenting than the consciousness of having had something worth the telling, which, in spite of all mental effort, just eludes the memory. It hovers nebulously beyond the outstretched finger-ends of recollection, and, like the fish that gets off the hook, becomes more and more important as the years fade. Perhaps, when you read this story, you will say there is nothing in it after all. Well, that will be my fault, then, and I can only regret I did not write down the story when it was told to me, for as I sat in the purser’s room that day it seemed to me I had never heard anything more graphic. The purser’s room was well forward on the Atlantic steamship. From one of the little red-curtained windows you could look down to where the steerage passengers were gathered on the deck. When the bow of the great vessel plunged down into the big Atlantic waves, the smother of foam that shot upwards would be borne along with the wind, and spatter like rain against the purser’s window. Something about this intermittent patter on the pane reminded the purser of the story, and so he told it to me.