night, and believed that she never left her chair. It may have been two months after Agnes came there to live, when we were sitting together one evening, and Agnes was telling us again of her father, of which she never tired, and I recollect that I made more inquiries about him than I had ever done, because my mother was much interested in my statement that men sometimes came back after an absence of a great many years, and told strange stories of adventure. I had no idea this was true of Captain Deming, of whose death there had never been any question, but my mother was listening closely, and I recalled several instances of the return of those given up for dead. “What evidence have you,” I asked, “that your father is dead, other than that he never came back?” Evidently Agnes had no thought of a possibility that he was alive, for though she immediately became grave and thoughtful, there was no expression of hope in her earnest face. After thinking about it a long while, she confessed that there was no evidence of his death except that he had never been heard from, which was the brief story of hundreds who had been drowned at sea. There was one part of the story which I had never before heard, though probably it was not important. The crew which her father had shipped at Bradford was discharged on reaching the first port, the captain claiming there were evidences of mutiny among them, though when they returned they declared that never were men more faithful and honest. Since that time neither the ship nor its captain had ever been heard of, and the returning sailors believed it had gone down because of the shipping of an incompetent crew. Agnes did not know, nor could the sailors who came back to Bradford tell her, what port the vessel loaded for when they were discharged, and this seemed so strange to me that I determined to insert an advertisement in a paper published in a sea town, and solicit information from the captains of that day. This would require a long time, so I resolved to say nothing of my intention, though I had little hope anything would come of it. I found that Agnes knew little about the matter, as she was very young when her father sailed away never to return, but her mother, she said, had made investigations which left no doubt of the shipwreck and death.