THE PURSER'S STORY.
O Mother-nature, kind in touch and tone,
Act as we may, thou cleavest to thine own.
I don't know that I should tell this story.
When the purser related it to me I know it was his intention to write it out for a magazine. In fact he had written it, and I understand that a noted American magazine had offered to publish it, but I have watched that magazine for over three years, and I have not yet seen the purser's story in it. I am sorry that I did not write the story at the time; then perhaps I should have caught the exquisite peculiarities of the purser's way of telling it. I find myself gradually forgetting the story and I write it now in case I shall forget it, and then be harassed all through after-life by the remembrance of the forgetting.
There is no position more painful and tormenting than the consciousness of having had something worth the telling, which, in spite of all mental
