The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-12-13
BY AsTLEY CONRAD.

A grizzled, sun-tanned, hard-featured man, whose face bore the stamp of hard ship and adventure, was sitting in the smoking room of a New York hotel He happened to glance at a calendar and saw that the day was December 24.
 "By Jovev" he exclaimed. "So tomor- row is Christmas Day. Unless something happens before then. 1t will be the quiet est Christmas I've spent in twenty-three years.
 Tn all that time have never been so near my old home in Scotland ct Christ mas time as am now. Often I've tried to get home, but somehow or other Christ mas has always found me in a tight corner in some out-of-the-way part of the world"
 This mans experience is typical of that of many globe-trotters in this age. when people are so fond of going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in It. like a certain parsonage in the Book of Job. The queerest and most adventu- rous Christmases nowadays are spent b. globe-trotters, who almost always have exciting stories to tell about what hap pened to them when the festive season caught them in Chinese Tartary or tha wiIds of New Guinea.
 A Christmas at Sea on c Raft.
 Christmas Day, 1887, found one English man facing death by hunger and thirst on board a life raft 300 miles southeast of Madagascar
 His ship had foundered seven days be fore in a hurricane. The boats were smashed by the fury of the waves. and some of the crew, washed overheard. The rest made a raft out of blanks and spars, but during the night high seas swept over the frail structure and carried away most of the water and provisions.
 "AH we had left" said the man. who went through this terrible experience, were a few tins of potted meat, a small barrel of biscuit. and the smallest of the water casks. That was all we had to keep life in twenty-five hungry men.
 We made 1t last as long as we could, but in four days everything was gone Some of the men fe.l into despair, and talked about throwing themselves over board. Perhaps they would have done so but during the night of the fourth day half a dozen big sharks swan around the raft in circles. The sea was phosphores- cent, and we could see them plainly in the waves of livid fire which they sti red up as they swan around. Even the half crazed men who had talked about drown ing themselves shrank from death in a sharks nav. and stayed upon the raft.
 Next morning I saw by a pocket diary which carried that the day was Decem- Der g. To keep up the mems spirits, I told them nao dreamed we were going to be rescued on Christmas Day. That appealed to the superstition inherent more or less. in all sailors, so I kept on telling them a ship would come along and pick us up on that day sure. until began to believe it myself We even dis cussed gravely whether the sail would heave in sight in the morning or the af- ternoon. and one man who said he 2 iess- ed it would toward evening became quite unpopular.
 Christmas morning broke with a dead calm on the oily. bistering sea and blazing sky that aggravated our thiret tenfold. There was not ship in sight all morning-nothing except that glassy sheet of water and that cruel cloudless sky above us. It was the same in the after noon. and our hopes fell as the sun sank slowly toward the western horizon.
 Just as we were beginning to despair, ana of the men screamed hysterlcally and