from place to place. With a captain who was a friend of Uncle Dan, he had made a trip to Bangor and Augusta, and he had likewise put in two weeks at a lumber camp in Maine, and a month during the summer at a hotel among the White Mountains, doing odd jobs for the proprietor.
"A rolling stone and nothing less," Uncle Dan had called him, over and over again, and the title seemed to fit Matt exactly.
At length, when Matt was fourteen years old, Uncle Dan Lincoln, who was then an elderly man, was taken with pneumonia, and died two weeks later. His wife, a crabbed woman, who detested Matt, and was glad when he was out of the house, at once sold out the chandlery, and went to live with her folks in a small village in Vermont. Thus Matt was thrown out upon his own resources with no capital but a ten dollar bill, which his Uncle had quietly slipped into his hand only a few days before the end.
Matt remained around Bridgeport but two days after his uncle's funeral. Then he struck up a bargain with the captain of a schooner which was loaded with freight for Philadelphia, and sailed for that city.
When no trace of Matt's father could be found the detectives who had been put on the case de-
