s, we shall go to find mamma!" This was said as
man and child stood for the last time on the lofty crag, while the
former ranged his dark eyes scrutinizingly around the horizon. Nothing
in sight!

Once more to their chapel of refuge, where, for the first time in all
their association, putting the child to sleep by himself, the doctor sat
down on the trestle by the entrance, and, lighted by the brilliant moon,
he caught up the tangled mazes of the hide net which had bound him, and
sedulously applied himself to a task before him.

Any one who has seen the effect produced by a violent gale upon the
tattered shreds of a shivered main-top-sail, bound up into the most
tortuous knots that it is possible to conceive of, and so hard and solid
that you might saw the canvas balls in slices like boards, may form some
idea of the task the doctor had imposed upon himself to loosen the hide
strands tied together by the furious fingers of the hurricane. Patiently
and quietly, with no sign of temper, he applied himself to the work, and
with nothing but a sharp-pointed spike to aid his hands, he began to
unravel, bit by bit, the laced knots and bunches of raw-hide, without
ever cutting a strand, until, as the moon sank glimmering down, the
tangled mass lay in clear coils beside him--though in several pieces,
where it had been severed by the teeth of that little mouse purring
behind the altar--and the task was done. Then raising the trestle, he
bore it within the altar, and with the now unraveled coil of hide, and
the softer silk rope for a pillow, he again stretched himself upon what
once had been his bed of torture.

For what possible object all this labor had been undertaken, or for what
future purpose--vague they must have been--no one but the persevering
man who did it can tell; and there he lay, no sound coming from his
compressed lips till the day dawned. Then he arose, and, kneeling over
the sleeping child, he again solemnly repeated the oath he had before
taken in his hut--

"Sleeping or waking, on land or sea, I devote the remainder of my
wretched life to returning this lost child to his mother. So help me
God!"

The little boy stirred, as if the angels and the sweet Virgin were
whispering their protecting power over him, and, with a smile dawning
upon his rosy, dimpled cheeks, he raised the lids from his bright hazel
eyes, and put his fat round arms around the doctor's neck. If two great
drops fell upon that upturned inno