' kept me starn fair for the meetin'-house, I'd
sure get home t' last."

"Which way, mister?"

Uncle Tommy pointed out to sea--to that far place in the east where
the dusk was creeping up over the horizon.

"There, b'y," said he. "Home lies there."

Then Uncle Tommy shifted his sail to the other shoulder and trudged on
up the hill; and Bagg threw himself on the ground and wept until his
sobs convulsed his scrawny little body.

"I want to go 'ome!" he sobbed. "I want to go 'ome!"

* * * * *

No wonder that Bagg, London born and bred, wanted to go home to the
crowd and roar and glitter of the streets to which he had been used.
It was fall in Ruddy Cove, when the winds are variable and gusty, when
the sea is breaking under the sweep of a freshening breeze and yet
heaving to the force of spent gales. Fogs, persistently returning with
the east wind, filled the days with gloom and dampness. Great breakers
beat against the harbour rocks; the swish and thud of them never
ceased, nor was there any escape from it.

Bagg went to the fishing grounds with Ezekiel Rideout, where he jigged
for the fall run of cod; and there he was tossed about in the lop, and
chilled to the marrow by the nor'easters. Many a time the punt ran
heeling and plunging for the shelter of the harbour, with the spray
falling upon Bagg where he cowered amidships; and once she was nearly
undone by an offshore gale. In the end Bagg learned consideration for
the whims of a punt and acquired an unfathomable respect for a gust
and a breaking wave.

Thus the fall passed, when the catching and splitting and drying of
fish was a distraction. Then came the winter--short, drear days, mere
breaks in the night, when there was no relief from the silence and
vasty space round about, and the dark was filled with the terrors of
snow and great winds and loneliness. At last the spring arrived, when
the ice drifted out of the north in vast floes, bearing herds of
hair-seal within reach of the gaffs of the harbour folk, and was
carried hither and thither with the wind.

Then there came a day when the wind gathered the dumpers and pans in
one broad mass and jammed it against the coast. The sea, where it had
lain black and fretful all winter long, was now covered and hidden.
The ice stretched unbroken from the rocks of Ruddy Cove to the limit
of vision in the east. And Bagg marvelled. There seemed to be a solid
path from Ruddy C