wanderlust bug wouldn't stand for it," he explained.

Right after that he struck a farmer's house where the farmer was sick, almost dying, with three little kids and a frail little woman trying to keep things up. He worked like ten men for more than a month on that farm, and when he went away he wouldn't take a cent. That's the sort of ne'er-do-well Thomas Jefferson was.

He wouldn't beg. He'd go three days without grub, and laugh all the time. It was mostly in the country and in small villages that he made his living. He could play seven different kinds of instruments without any instruments at all. Did it all with his mouth. And the kids—they went wild over him. In return for his entertainment, Thomas Jefferson wasn't ashamed to take whatever came to him in the way of odd nickels and dimes.

Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and offered him a job at fifty a week if he'd sign a contract for a dozen weeks.

"Good Lord," said Thomas Jefferson, "I wouldn't know what to do with six hundred dollars!"

The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That's Thomas Jefferson—or, rather, that's what he was.

And now we're coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas Jefferson—and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue eyes—the sort that can light up a dark day, and can make your head turn dizzy when they smile at you. And she's got the right sort of hair to go with 'em—red and gold and brown all mixed up, until you can't tell which is which; the sort that makes you wonder if some big artist hasn't been painting a picture for you, when you see it out in the sunshine.

She comes of a titled family, but she'd want to die to-morrow if Thomas Jefferson Brown didn't worship her from the tips of her little toes to the top of her pretty head. She thinks he's a king. And he is—one of those great, big, healthy kings that nature sometimes grows when it has half a chance.

II

It's curious how the whole thing happened. Thomas Jefferson wandered up to Portland at the time we were fitting out a ship for a whaling cruise. We saw him imitating a banjo for a lot of kids down on the wharf, and the minute our eyes lit on him—Tucker's and mine—we liked him. It isn't necessary to go into the details of what happened after that. Just a week later, when Thomas Jefferson and I were shaking hands for the last time, a queer sort of look came into his eyes, and he said:

"Bobby, you're the first man I ever knew that makes me feel like crying when you leave me."

He said it just like one of the kids he'd tickled half to death on the wharf. There was a little jerking in his throat, and there came into his face a look so gentle that it made me think of a girl.

"Why don't you come along on this cruise with me?" I said.

Thomas Jefferson gave a sudden start, and a queer expression came into his eyes, as if he saw something out on the sea that had startled him. Then he laughed. You could hear that laugh of Thomas Jefferson's three blocks away, and sunshine in winter couldn't bring more cheer than the sound of it. He looked at me for a moment, and then said:

"Bobby, I'll go!"

It wasn't forty-eight hours before Thomas Jefferson had a first mortgage on every soul aboard the "Sleeping Sealer," from the cap'n to the oiler down in the engine-room. He was able, all right, but you couldn't have made an able seaman out of him in a hundred years. For all that, he did the work of three men. The first thing you heard when you woke up in the morning was his whistle, and the last thing you heard at night was his laugh or his song. He did everything, from cooking to telling us why Germany couldn't lick England, and how the United States could clean up the map of the earth if Congress would spend less money on job-making bureaus and a little more on war-ships.

Then we