At the Black Rocks

by Edward A. Rand

"Oh yes. Here it is. Nobody has come to claim it."

He took the box down from its shelf and placed it on the table.

The keeper's companion said, "Now I will tell you the story about that box, and this letter, too, will confirm it."

As he spoke he took a letter from his pocket and opened it.

"The man who wrote that was an old shipmate, Grant Williams, a warm friend, and faithful too. He knew I had a weakness, and used to say he was afraid his shipmate would get into the breakers. He sent me a letter from a foreign port; here it is. You look at it. You will see that he gave me some good advice. He laid it all down like a chart; but I was a poor hand to steer by it. 'I expect to sail for Shipton in a Norwegian bark,' he wrote (I think he was born in Norway himself, but had been a long time in America), 'and I am going to get and bring my old shipmate a present of a box of sandal-wood, and I shall pack a few keepsakes into it. I will put my picture in, just to make it seem all the more like a present from me. I will put your initials and mine on the under side of the box. I will leave it at Shipton with your father if you are not there. And now don't forget this: it is to be a reminder of my desire that you should let liquor alone. When you see it, think of an old shipmate, and look at my face you will find in the box.' The first time I saw the box was that morning after the night you found me in a state that was no credit to the one found. I knew the ship had been wrecked, and only that, and when I saw the face of my old shipmate, and knew that he had been lost on the bar where I came pretty near losing my own life through what he warned me against, I--I--felt it. I didn't see how I could take the box until I was in a condition to give some promise, you know, that I would be a better man; and now I hope I am, God being my helper."

"Well, I think it is plain proof that you are the one whom the man Williams meant, and the owner of this box, if those are your initials on the bottom--if--"

The keeper was about to ask the man for his name, but the sound of a light step tripping downstairs arrested their conversation, and both turned toward the stairway.

It was Bart Trafton. He looked up, stopped, started forward, and exclaimed, "Why, father!"

"This you, Bart?" said Thomas Trafton. "How came you here?--My boy, Mr. Tolman. My vessel is off there in the stream, and while waiting for the wind I just rowed over."

There they stood, side by side, Bart and his father, while the keeper was rising to hand the box to Thomas Trafton. The lighthouse kitchen never presented a more interesting scene than that of the reformed sailor in the presence of his oft-abused child, taking into his hands this gift, that had survived a wrecking storm, to be not only a pledge of the friendship of the dead, but to the living a stimulus to right-doing and a warning against wrong.