earned none of those good marks whereby a prisoner can purchase the remission of a certain proportion of his sentence; and as a result he served the full term of his imprisonment, every moment of which seemed crowded with the tortures of hell! And when at length he emerged once more into the world, he did so as a thoroughly soured, embittered, cynical, utterly hopeless and reckless man, without a shred of faith in anything that was good.

The first thing that he learned, upon attaining his freedom, was that although the Earl, his father, had, after all, survived the shock of his son’s disgrace, he had made a solemn vow never to forgive him, never to see him again, and never to have any communication with him. He had, however, made arrangements with his solicitors that his son should be met at the prison gates and conveyed thence to London, where he was lodged in a quiet hotel until arrangements could be made for his shipment off to Australia. This was quickly done; and within a week of his release the young man, under the assumed name of Richard Leslie, found himself a saloon passenger on board the Golden Fleece, with a plain but sufficient outfit for the voyage, and one hundred pounds in his pocket to enable him to make a new start in life at the antipodes; the gift of the money, however, was accompanied by a request from the Earl that he would never again show his face in England, or even in Europe.

At the moment when this story opens the sound of the ship’s bell—upon which “four bells” had just been struck—was still vibrating upon the wet, fog-laden air; the steerage passengers were all below, and most of them in their bunks; while the cuddy people, with one solitary exception, were in the brilliantly lighted saloon, amusing themselves with cards, books, and music. The exception was Leslie, who, having changed out of his dress clothes into a comfortable suit of blue serge, was down in the waist of the ship, smoking a gloomily retrospective pipe. The ship’s reckoning, that day, had placed her, at noon, in Latitude 32 degrees 10 minutes North, and Longitude 26 degrees 55 minutes West; she was therefore about midway between the parallels of Madeira and Teneriffe, but some four hundred miles, or thereabouts, to the westward of those islands. The wind was blowing a moderate breeze from about south-east by South; and the ship, close-hauled on the port tack, and with all plain sail set, to her royals, was heading south-west, and going through the water at the rate of a good honest seven knots. The helmsman was steering by compass, and not by the sails, since it was impossible to see anything above a dozen feet up from the deck; hence the ship was going along with everything a-rap full.

Captain Rainhill was very far from being easy in his mind. Seven knots, he meditated, was a good pace at which to be sailing through a fog thick enough to cut with a knife, and would mean something very much like disaster if the ship happened to run up against anything, particularly if that “anything” happened also to be travelling at about the same speed in the opposite direction; from this point of view, therefore, the speed of the Golden Fleece just then constituted a decided element of danger. On the other hand, however, it enabled her to promptly answer her helm, and thus might be the means of enabling her to swerve quickly aside and so avoid any danger that might suddenly loom up out of the fog around her; and in this sense it became a safeguard. Then there was the fact that the Golden Fleece was no longer in a crowded part of the ocean; it was three days since they had sighted a craft of any description, and there might be at that moment nothing within a couple of hundred miles of them, in which case there was absolutely nothing to fear. Furthermore, his owners made an especial point of persistently impressing upon their captains the great importance of—nay, more, the urgent necessity for—making quick passages; there were two keen-eyed lookouts stationed upon the topgallant-forecastle, and between them a third man provided with a fog-horn, upon which he at brief intervals blew the weirdest of blasts. Taking into consideration all these circumstances the skipper finally decided to leave things as they were, and put his trust in the “sweet little cherub that sits up aloft to look after the life of poor Jack.”

“Five bells” pealed out upon the dank air, and the responsive cry of “All’s well” from the look-outs came wailing aft from the forecastle. Leslie’s pipe was out. He knocked out the dead ashes, and turned to go below. Then, considering the matter further, he decided that it was full early yet to turn in, and, sauntering across the deck to the port rail, he stood gazing abstractedly out to windward as he slowly filled his pipe afresh. The man with the fog-horn was still industriously blowing long blasts to windward when, ruthlessly cutting into one of these, there suddenly came—from apparently close at hand, on the port bow—the loud discordant yell of a steam syren; and the next instant three lights—red, green, and white, arranged in the form of an isosceles triangle—broke upon Leslie’s gaze with startling suddenness through the dense fog, broad on the port bow of the Golden Fleece. A large steamer, coming along at full speed, was close aboard and heading straight for the sailing ship!

Leslie’s professional training at once asserted itself and, as a frenzied shout of “Steamer broad on the port bow!” came pealing aft from the throats of the two startled lookouts, he made a single bound for the poop ladder, crying, in a voice that rang through the ship, from stem to stern—

“Port! hard a-port, for your life! Over with the wheel, for God’s sake!”

His cry was broken in upon by a mad jangling of engine-room bells accompanied by a perfect babel of excited shouts—evidently in some foreign tongue—on board the stranger, mingled with equally excited shouts and the sudden trampling of feet forward, and loud-voiced commands from Captain Rainhill on the poop. As Leslie reached the head of the poop ladder the steamer crashed with terrific force into the port side of the ill-fated Golden Fleece, just forward of the fore rigging. So tremendous was the shock that every individual who happened at the moment to be on his, or her, feet on board the sailing ship was thrown to the deck; while, as for the ship herself, she was heeled over by it until the water poured like a cataract in over her starboard topgallant rail; there was a horrid crunching sound as the ponderous iron bows of the steamer irresistibly clove their way through the wooden side and decks of the ship; a loud twanging aloft told of severed rigging; there was a terrifying crash of breaking spars overhead; and then, all in a moment, as it seemed, the main deck and poop became alive with shrieking, shouting, distraught people rushing aimlessly hither and thither, and excitedly demanding of each other what was the matter.

The skipper, confounded for the moment by the appalling suddenness of the catastrophe, quickly recovered himself and, turning to the chief mate, ordered him to go forward to investigate the extent of the damage. Then, finding Mr Ferris, the second mate, at his elbow, he said—

“Mr Ferris, muster the watches at once—port watch to the port side, and starboard watch to the starboard side—and set them to work to clear away the boats for launching. Where is the chief steward?”

“Here, sir,” answered the individual in question, forcing his way through the excited crowd that surrounded the skipper.

“Good!” ejaculated Rainhill. “Muster your stewards, sir, and turn-to upon the job of getting provisions and water up on deck for the boats. And, as you go, pass the word for all passengers to dress in their warmest clothing, and make up in packages any valuables that they may desire to take with them in the event of our being obliged to leave the ship. But they must leave their luggage behind; there will be no