"I sometimes think the water has washed the memory of what went before clean out of his head," Eileen had said to her husband, in some disappointment at her failure to learn anything of the boy's history from him. "It seems strange he should have forgotten everything, such a quick, noticing little fellow as he is. He talks a little about a ship to Pat; but never seems to remember the people who were with him. I can't make it out. At his age, Pat would have been able to tell anybody where he lived, and what his name was, and who his father and mother were. It puzzles me altogether, that it does. And we want to send a message ashore when the relief boat comes. I'd have liked to be able to say who the boy was." "Well, we'll say enough for his relations to know him by, if he's got any living claim to him, poor little chap. I suppose the children of the gentry, who always have a nurse beside them, don't learn to be as knowing and independent as our little ones, who have to fend for themselves so much sooner. Pat may be will find out something more sooner or later. He chatters away to him like a young magpie. The child looks a deal better since his little prince came. It's good for boys to be together. I'll not grumble if his folks don't come for him in a hurry. Look at them now; why, they are as happy as kings together--and a deal happier than many kings, I take it, if all we hear of the ways of the world is true." The two boys were sitting in the hot sunshine in the lee of the lighthouse, and the tame sea-gull was hopping about near to them, sometimes diving into a pool after a dainty morsel that caught his eye, sometimes flapping his wings, and uttering his harsh cries, which seemed those of joy at seeing the sunshine again. Pat was evidently telling a tale to the little one of more than usual interest. The little prince's eyes were fixed upon his face with a look of wrapped absorption, his rosy lips were parted, and his whole expression was one of deep and undivided attention. He was in reality hearing the story of the little boy who had been seen a few nights ago, just as it was growing to be dawn, floating on the water on a broken spar; and of the brave man in the lighthouse, who had swum out amongst the great waves to bring him in safe to shore; and Prince Rupert had been more fascinated by this tale--told with all the graphic power of which the youthful eye-witness was capable--than by any other from Pat's store; and when at the close he was told that he himself had been the little boy, and that it was Jim who had gone into the boiling sea to fetch him out, he looked fairly bewildered at the idea, and turning his dark eyes towards the lighthouse behind, he looked up and down, and then asked-- "And where is poor Jim?--does he live here, too?"