ssing. They firmly believed that God had sent him to them to increase
their happiness, and they lavished upon him all the love and affection
of their simple hospitable natures. They were deeply solicitous for his
health, and responding to gentle care the fever quickly left him, for he
was, naturally, a strong and well-developed child.

They understood few words of English, but they soon discovered that the
boy called himself "Bobby," and Bobby was accepted as his name. Bobby,
on his part, spoke English indifferently, and of all other tongues and
especially the Eskimo tongue, he was wholly ignorant. At that period of
his life it was quite immaterial to him, indeed, what language he spoke
so long as the language served to make his wants known; and he began to
acquire an Eskimo vocabulary sufficient for his immediate needs, and his
efforts in this direction afforded his foster parents a vast deal of
pleasure.

Mrs. Abel Zachariah, considering the clothing Bobby wore quite too fine
for ordinary use, and unsuited to the climate and the conditions of his
new surroundings and life, fashioned for him a suit of coarse but warmer
fabric. When this was finished to her liking she dressed him in it, and
washed and folded and laid away in a chest the things he had worn, as a
precious souvenir of his coming.

From the skins of Arctic hares, which Abel killed with the wonderful
shotgun, she made him a warm little jacket with a hood; for his feet
she made sealskin moccasins, with legs that reached to his knees, and
sewed them with sinew to render them waterproof, that his feet might be
kept quite dry when the rocks were wet with rains, or when the first
moist snows of autumn fell, as they did with the coming of September.
And when the great flocks of wild ducks and geese came flying out of the
North, the feathers of all that Abel shot were carefully hoarded in bags
for Bobby's winter bed.

And so the weeks passed until early October. The land was now white with
snow, and steadily increasing cold warned them that winter was at hand
and that presently the bays and sea would be frozen. It was time now for
Abel to set his fox traps, and time for them to move to their winter
cabin on the mainland.

This cabin was situated at the head of a deep bay which the Eskimos call
"Tissiuhaksoak," but which English-speaking folk called "Abel's Bay,"
because Abel was the first to build a cabin there; and we, being
English-speaking people, shall als