Jack the Hunchback: A Story of Adventure on the Coast of Maine

Front Cover
That which had come out of the east on this bright June morning was a ship's lifeboat about eighteen feet long.—Page 4.
Author of The Castaways, A Runaway Brig, Search for the Silver City, The Treasure Finders, With Lafayette at Yorktown, With Washington at Monmouth, The Treasure of Cocos Island, Wrecked on Spider Island, etc., etc.
NEW YORK: A. L. BURT, PUBLISHER
Copyright, 1892, By Bradley & Woodruff.
All rights reserved.
Tom Pratt firmly believed he was the most unfortunate boy in Maine when, on a certain June morning, his father sent him to the beach for a load of seaweed.
Tom had never been in love with a farmer's life.
He fancied that in any other sphere of action he could succeed, if not better, certainly more easily, than by weeding turnips or hoeing corn on the not very productive farm.
But either planting or digging was preferable to loading a huge cart with the provokingly slippery weeds which his father insisted on gathering for compost each summer.
Therefore, when the patient oxen, after much goading and an unusual amount of noise from their impatient driver, stood knee-deep in the surf contentedly chewing their cuds and enjoying the cool footbath, Tom, instead of beginning his work, sat at the forward part of the cart gazing seaward, thinking, perhaps, how pleasant must be a sailor's life while the ocean was calm and smiling as on this particular day.
So deeply engrossed was he in idleness that his father's stern command from the hillside a short distance away, to 'tend to his work an' stop moonin', passed unheeded, and the same ox-goad he had been using might have been applied to his own body but for the fact that just as Farmer Pratt came within striking distance a tiny speck on the water attracted his attention.