"Why, Gregory!" the naval lieutenant cried, as the castaway climbed from the steamer's boat to her deck. "Why, you blasted old cracked fiddle! what in----" "Right, the first guess!" laughed Gregory, "there's where I've been!" and in the cabin he explained all. "The fiddle's mended," he concluded. "You can play a tune on it--by being careful." "But what's your tune?" asked his hearer; "you cannot go back to that island." "Yes, I'll be on it in a week--with a schooner-load of cattle. I can get them on credit. Going to raise cattle there as a regular business. They'll fatten in that marsh like blackbirds." True enough, before the week was up the mended fiddle was playing its tune. It was not until Gregory's second return from his island that he came to see us and told us his simple story. We asked him how it was that the steamer, that first time, had come so much earlier than she generally did. "She didn't," he replied. "I had miscounted one day." "Don't you," asked my wife, who would have liked a more religious tone in Gregory's recital, "don't you have trouble to keep run of your Sabbaths away out there alone?" "Why"--he smiled--"it's always Sunday there. Here almost everybody feels duty bound to work harder than somebody else, or else make somebody else work harder than he, and you need a day every now and then for Sunday--or Sabbath, at least. Oh, I suppose it's all one in the end, isn't it? You take your's in a pill, I take mine in a powder. Not that it's the least bit like a dose, however, except for the good it does." "And you're really prospering, even in a material way!" I said. "Yes," he answered. "O yes; the island's already too small for us." "It's certainly very dangerously exposed," said my wife, and I guessed her thought was on Last Island, which, you remember, though very large and populous, had been, within our recollection, totally submerged, with dreadful loss of life. "O yes," he responded, "there's always something wherever you are. One of these days some storm's going to roll the sea clean over the whole thing." "Then, why don't you move to a bigger island closer inshore?" she asked. "I'm afraid," said Gregory, and smiled. "Afraid!" said my wife, incredulously. "Yes," he responded. "I'm afraid my prisoner'll get away from me." As his hand closed over hers in good-by I saw, what he could not, that she had half a notion to kiss it. I told her so when he was gone, and kissed hers--for him. "I don't care," she said, dreamily, as it lingered in mine, "I'm glad I mended his coat for him that time." * * * * * The Taxidermist I