ame to him and were persuaded to tell their
names. They were the children, David thought, of a young lad whom he had
known as a boy; and presently, as the manner of children is when they
have laid aside fear, they told him many small things, their ages and
their doings, and other little affairs which seem so big to a child; and
then they would take his hands and lead him to the village, while David
smiled to be so lovingly attended. He was surprised, when he entered the
street, to see how curiously he was regarded. Even men and women, that
he had known, would hardly speak with him, but did him reverence. The
children would lead him to their house first; and so he went thither,
not unwilling. When they were at the place, he found with a gentle
wonder that it was even the house where he had himself dwelt. He went
in, and found the mother of the children within, one whom he had known
as a girl. She greeted him with the same reverence as the rest; so that
he at last took courage, and asked her why it should not be as it had
been before. And then he learned from her talk, with a strange surprise,
that it was thought that he was a very holy man, much visited by God,
who not only had been shown how, by a kind of magical secret, to save
ships from falling on that deadly coast, but as one whose prayers
availed to guard and keep the whole place safe. He tried to show her
that this was not so, and that he was a simple person in great need of
holiness; but he saw that she only thought him the holier for his
humility, so he was ashamed to say more.

Then he went to the chief man in the village, and told him wherefore he
had come--that there was a wreck on the shore of the islands, and that
there were bodies that must be buried. One more visit he paid, and that
was to the little maiden whom he had seen the last when he went away.
She was now nearly grown to a woman, and her grandmother was very old
and weak, and near her end. David went there alone, and said that he had
returned as he had promised; but he found that the child had much lost
her remembrance of him, and could hardly see the friend she had known in
the strong and wild-looking figure that he had become. He talked a
little quietly; the old grandmother, who could not move from her chair,
was easier with him, and asked him, looking curiously upon him, whether
he had found that of which he went in search. "Nay, mother," he said,
"not found; but I am like a man whose feet are s