When we got to Gravesend, I had a great surprise; for, who on earth do you think should come off to the ship as we anchored in the stream, waiting for a pilot to take us up the river to the Saint Katherine's Docks, where we were bound? The very last person in the world whom you or I could possibly have expected to meet me there! Who do you think? Why, dad! Yes--he; and none other. It seems that shortly after I sailed in the _Josephine_, the gentleman who had made him an offer to purchase Mount Pleasant when I was ill--and then backed out of the bargain because dad would not immediately come to terms--renewed the proposal, and dad accepted at once. Then, as he had nothing remaining to keep him out in the West Indies, he took passages in the next mail steamer home for my mother and my sisters and himself, arriving over here even before I could have expected to reach England had all gone well with our ship. When they got to London, however, news came from Lloyd's that the _Josephine_ was lost, as our boats, which had been swept away in the hurricane, had been picked up by a homeward-bound ship. Needless to say, dad and all my folk were heart-broken at hearing this. Hardly, however, had they become reconciled to my death, as they thought, than a fresh piece of intelligence was passed on from Flores, narrating how we had touched there, all well on board; so, as soon as we were reported as being sighted in the Channel, dad was on the watch to be the first to greet me, coming down specially to Gravesend to board the ship as soon as she entered the river. I need not describe the meeting with dad in the first place, nor the way in which my mother and sisters, dear little Tot included, welcomed me? Hardly! Jake must have the last word, though; for, it was only through his faithfulness that I had been preserved during all our perils on the sea. You must remember that, not only did he save me from drowning in the first instance, when the vessel capsized; but, it was mainly through his watchful attentions that my life was saved during the time that I was exposed on the hull of the ship while she was on her beam-ends. "Golly, Massa Eastman," he cried out to dad the moment he put foot on board the _Josephine_, "I'se look arter Mass' Tom, as I promiss, suah, and here he am, sah, safe an' sound!" So I was; but, in spite of that, I have never forgotten my experiences of the Sargasso Sea, nor The White Squall. THE END. End of Project Gutenberg's The White Squall, by John Conroy Hutcheson