t sort o' wood?"

"Man alive! Does it matter what sort o' wood, when I tell you the child
was thievin'. You encourage her to play truant, defyin' the law; an' now
she's doin' what'll bring her to Bodmin Gaol, as sure as fate. A child
scarce over thirteen--an' you're makin' a gaol-bird o' her! The Lord
knows, Sam Tregenza, I think badly enough of you, but will you stand there
an' tell me 'tis no odds to you that your grandchild's a thief?"

"Liz wouldn' steal your wood, nor nobody's-else's, unless some person had
put her up to it," answered the old man, knitting his brows to which the
sawdust still adhered. "Come to think, now, the maid told me the other
day that you'd been speakin' to her, sayin' that minchin' from school was
robbin' the public, an' she'd do honester to be stealin' it from you than
pickin' it up along the foreshore durin' school-hours. You may depend
that's what put it into her head. She's a very well-meanin' child."

The Elder shook like a ship in stays. The explanation was monstrous--yet
it was obviously the true one. What could he say to it? What could any
sane man say to it?

While he stood and cast about for words, his face growing redder and
redder, a breeze of air from the hill behind the cottage blew open the
upper flap of its back door--which Tregenza had left on the latch--and
passing through the kitchen, slammed-to the door leading into the street.
The noise of it made the Elder jump. The next moment he was gasping
again, as his gaze travelled out to the back-court.

"Good Lord, what's that?"

"Eh?"--Tregenza followed his gaze--"You mean to tell me you ha'n't heard?
Well, well. . . . You live too much alone, Elder; you take my word.
That's the terrible thing about riches. They cut you off from your
fellows. But only to think you never heard tell o' my boat!"

The old man led the way out into the yard; and there, indeed, amid an
indescribable litter of timber--wreckwood in balks and boards, worthless
lengths of deck-planking, knees, and transoms, stem-pieces and
stern-posts, and other odds and ends of bygone craft, condemned spars,
barrel-staves, packing-cases--a boat reposed on the stocks; but such a
boat as might make a sane man doubt his eyesight. The Elder stared
at her slowly, incapable of speech; stared and pulled out a bandanna
handkerchief and slowly wiped the back of his neck. She measured, in
fact, nineteen or twenty feet over-all, but to the eye she appeared
con