Uncle Dick looked up at the blue sky—intensely blue it was that day, as deep and measureless as infinity. "Where is she? I don't know: I wish I did. But He knows, and I shall find out some time." Then he added, briefly, "My sister Lily died of consumption when she was fifteen, and I about ten years old."
"And what about her grapes? Is it a story—a true story?"
"Quite true to me, though all might not believe it. Some might even laugh at it, and I don't like to be laughed at. No I don't mind; it can't harm me. I'll tell you, boys, if you like to hear. It may be a good lesson for some of you."
We did not much care for "lessons," but we liked a story; so we begged Uncle Dick to tell us this one from the very beginning.
"No, not from the beginning, which could benefit neither you nor me," said Uncle Dick, gravely. "I'll take up my tale from the point I mentioned, when I found myself at midnight on the deck of the Colorado Australian steamer, bound for London, fast going down. And she went down."
"You with her?"
"Not exactly, or how could I be here sitting quietly fishing? which seems odd when I think of the hurly-burly of that night. It had come quite suddenly after a long spell of fair weather, which we found so dull that we began drinking, smoking, gambling, and even fighting now and then; for we were a rough lot, mostly 'diggers' who, like myself, had worked a 'claim,' or half a claim, at Ballarat—worked it so well that they soon found they had made a fortune, so determined to go to Europe and spend it.
"I thought I would do the same. I was quite young, yet I had amassed as much money as many a poor fellow—a clergyman, or a soldier, or an author—can scrape together in a lifetime; and I wanted to spend it in seeing life. Hitherto I had seen nothing at all—in civilization, that is. I never had the least bit of 'fun,' until I ran away from home seven years before; and very little fun after, for it was all hard work. Now, having been so lucky as to make my fortune, I meant to use it in enjoying myself.
"I had never enjoyed home very much. My people, good as they were, were rather dull, or at least I thought them so. They always bothered me about 'duty,' till I hated the very sound of the word. They called my fun mischief; my mischief they considered a crime; so I slipped away from them, and after a letter or two I gradually let them go, or fancied they were letting me go, and forgot almost their very existence. I might have been a waif and stray drifted ashore from the sea or dropped from the clouds, so little did I feel as if I had any one belonging to me. My relations, even my parents, had all melted out of my mind; for weeks I sometimes never once thought of them—never remembered that I had a father, or mother, or brothers. Lily had been my only sister, and she died."
Uncle Dick stopped a moment, then continued: