“I tell you,” said the skipper, “that the boy calls everybody his father. I dare say he’s claimed another by this time.” Even as he spoke the handle turned, and the door opening a few inches disclosed the anxious face of Master Jones. Mrs. Hunt, catching the skipper’s eye, pointed to it in an ecstasy of silent wrath. There was a breathless pause, broken at last by the boy. “Mother!” he said, softly. Mrs. Hunt stiffened in her chair and her arms fell by her side as she gazed in speechless amazement. Master Jones, opening the door a little wider, gently insinuated his small figure into the room. The skipper gave one glance at his wife and then, turning hastily away, put his hand over his mouth, and, with protruding eyes, gazed out of the window. “Mother, can I come in?” said the boy. “Oh, Polly!” sighed the skipper. Mrs. Hunt strove to regain the utterance of which astonishment had deprived her. “I ... what ... Joe ... don’t be a fool!” “Yes, I’ve no doubt,” said the skipper, theatrically. “Oh, Polly! Polly! Polly!” He put his hand over his mouth again and laughed silently, until his wife, coming behind him, took him by the shoulders and shook him violently. “This,” said the skipper, choking; “this is what ... you’ve been worried about ... This is the secret what’s——” He broke off suddenly as his wife thrust him by main force into a chair, and standing over him with a fiery face dared him to say another word. Then she turned to the boy. “What do you mean by calling me ‘mother’?” she demanded. “I’m not your mother.” “Yes, you are,” said Master Jones. Mrs. Hunt eyed him in bewilderment, and then, roused to a sense of her position by a renewed gurgling from the skipper’s chair, set to work to try and thump that misguided man into a more serious frame of mind. Failing in this, she sat down, and, after a futile struggle, began to laugh herself, and that so heartily that Master Jones, smiling sympathetically, closed the door and came boldly into the room. The statement, generally believed, that Captain Hunt and his wife adopted him, is incorrect, the skipper accounting for his continued presence in the house by the simple explanation that he had adopted them. An explanation which Mr. Samuel Brown, for one, finds quite easy of acceptance. A WILL AND A WAY The old man sat over the tap-room fire at the “Cauliflower,” his gnarled, swollen hands fondled the warm bowl of his long pipe, and an ancient eye watched with almost youthful impatience the slow warming of a mug of beer on the hob. He had just given unasked-for statistics to the visitor at the inn who was sitting the other side of the hearth. His head was stored with the births, marriages, and deaths of Claybury, and with a view of being entertaining he had already followed, from the cradle to the altar and the altar to the grave, the careers of some of the most uninteresting people that ever breathed.