trial was quickly finished. The young woman was
the only one amongst them who could understand the English language, and
she answered the judge's questions, and when the sentence had been
passed, the others in their anxiety to hear from her how long a term
they had been condemned to, almost mobbed her, and in the struggle the
black shawl covering her head fell to the floor.

"Look, Jim, look!" shouted Joe to his brother above the din the
Doukhobors made, while at the same time he pointed towards the young
woman's head, upon which one braid of white hair stood plainly out
against a black braid on each side of it. "She is the first human being
I ever saw or heard of that had the birth-mark of the McDonald's." Then
a vague suspicion flashed through his mind and he asked the officer to
bring the woman over to where he was standing so he could question her
concerning her past.

While the judge and the barristers were engaged in writing the
commitment papers, Joe asked the woman to tell him who was her mother,
and when she pointed at a wrinkled hag, he had the policeman stand the
latter beside her daughter, who now acted as interpreter. Now Joe had
Jim's daughter stand beside the younger woman, and when the old hag
noted the resemblance between the two she paled and commenced to weep.
Aided by the policeman, and the promise that if the Doukhobor woman told
the truth concerning the young woman's parentage she would not be
molested, and greatly influenced by the fact that her sect, like the
Quakers, consider telling an untruth a mortal sin, she told the
following story:

While she and her husband in company with many others of their sect were
crossing the Atlantic, during the stormy winter voyage, her only child,
a little girl, died and was buried at sea. They landed in America and
were loaded aboard an immigrant train, which several days later stopped
in a snow covered prairie. Looking out of the coach window, the bereaved
mother saw a little tot, just the size of their own "Maritzka", playing
in the snow below the window, and yearning for her departed baby she had
climbed from the train and petted the little child, who instead of being
frightened by the strange woman, permitted her to kiss its rosy cheeks,
and while she felt the tot's chubby hands and soft limbs, the mother
love which she used to lavish upon her own Maritzka got the upper hand
of her, and noting that no one was guarding this smiling baby girl, and
that no