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Memory is treacherous. In a few days I had forgotten this yarn with the other, and might never have recalled it had I not ascended to an upper floor in the lofty Flatiron Building, and looked out of a window at the loftier, but unfinished, tower of the Metropolitan Building across the park. It was a damp, dismal day of fog; but at my elevation I could see clear of it. I was above it, looking over an undulating sea of cloud bank from which the tower rose, massive and mighty, apparently floating on end, like an immense spar buoy at the turn of the tide. The rest of New York lay hidden beneath that silent gray ocean of fog.

Interesting as it was of itself, it was not the spectacle before me that gripped and held me, but an associated idea. As it was the first time I had ever seen a skyscraper lift itself above the clouds, so it naturally reminded me of the first time I had seen a mountaintop above the clouds. This was Krakatoa Island, a conical mountain rising from the sea in the Straits of Sunda, but since submerged in the Java earthquake.

With this mental picture before me, my thoughts touched upon other happenings of that boyhood voyage–the long, tedious beat through the straits against light head winds and a continuous head tide; the man-killing log windlass, round which we hove, and lightened, chain of an eight-inch link; the natives, with their welcome fruit in exchange for trinkets; and, lastly, the white-haired old pilot, who came forward to visit me one evening on anchor watch.

And then, like an inspired flash, there surged into my mind, not only the two galley yarns, but the story told by the pilot–a story of such burning power and horror that, though forgotten for a generation, it spelled itself out, word for word, as I stared into the fog from the window, exactly as the old man had told it.

He had heard from the skipper that I was from the same part of New York State as himself, and he had come forward for news of home. I could give him little. I knew no one that he knew; the small town that give him birth was not far from my own, but was only a name to me. Still he remained to talk. My up-State accent pleased him, he said, and reminded him of home, which he had not seen for forty years, and which he hardly hoped to see. He was sixty-five; two shocks had come, and the third would finish him.

“But I’m an old, experienced man, my boy,” he said, “and I can give you my life’s wisdom in three short rules, easy to remember and easy to follow. Stick to your skipper; leave liquor alone; and never, under any provocation, engage in mutiny. I broke every one of these, and here I’ve been, for half a lifetime, an exile, afraid to go home.”

Not realizing how sorely I needed this wisdom, but keenly interested in mutiny, piracy, and such fancies of boyhood, I asked for light, and he gave it to me.

“I won’t tell you the name of the ship,” he said; “for you’ll be a boy for some time to come, and you might talk about it. Nor will I give you the real names of the men engaged in that mutiny; for it is only forty years back, and there may be men alive yet who will be interested in the fate of the ship; though none, I expect, who would care much about her crew. But I’ll tell you that her crew was the toughest gang I ever saw in a forecastle, and her skipper and mate the most inhuman brutes I ever saw aft. I was second mate, and, having won my berth in deep water, thought I was something of a bucko; but I found my masters there. The ship, I may as well say, was one of the packets that traded between New York and Liverpool, sometimes carrying passengers, but not always. We had none this trip.