Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/137

 was one who managed somehow to go ashore as mysteriously as he had come aboard. The old Chinaman with his treasured pine tree disappeared, no one knew whither, hiding himself, perhaps, lest some emissary from Africa should even yet seek him out and rob him. For more than a month Humphrey searched and inquired for him all up and down the shore of the bay, but no one had seen him and no one knew where he had gone.

Jonathan Adams' ship the West Wind sailed on many voyages and was the model for other vessels of her class, bigger and swifter even than herself—the great race of American clippers that once ruled the seas. They gave our country the highest place in the world's shipping, and they brought her, even as Humphrey had said, a thousand miles nearer to her neighbors across the Atlantic. But that is not all of the story of this famous voyage. The real end came seven years later, when Humphrey had risen to be Commodore Reynolds and when, between two cruises, he was spending a holiday at home. One summer afternoon, a small, bent figure toiled up the driveway of the big house above the Susquehanna. Humphrey, with Miranda, was sitting in the shade of the high-columned veranda and for a moment did not recognize the strange face, so covered with dust that the yellow skin and slanting eyes were scarcely visible. But the old Chinaman