he doctor asked.

She looked up--in a glow of pride. And she flushed gloriously while she
turned her eyes once more upon the gasping, ill-featured babe upon her
breast.

"He said 'mama'--once!" she answered.

In the fog--far, far away, in the distances beyond Skull Island, which
were hidden--the doctor found at that moment some strange interest.

"Once?" he asked, his face still turned away.

"Ay, zur," she solemnly declared. "I calls my God t' witness! I'm not
makin' believe, zur," she went on, with rising excitement. "They says t'
Bowsprit Head that I dreamed it, zur, but I knows I didn't. 'Twas at the
dawn. He lay here, zur--here, zur--on me breast. I was wide awake,
zur--waitin' for the day. Oh, he said it, zur," she cried, crushing the
child to her bosom. "I heared un say it! 'Mama!' says he."

"When I have cured him," said the doctor, gently, "he will say more than
that."

"What say?" she gasped.

"When I have taken--something--out of his throat--with my knife--he will
be able to say much more than that. When he has grown a little older, he
will say, 'Mama, I loves you!'"

The woman began to cry.

* * * * *

There is virtue for the city-bred, I fancy, in the clean salt air and
simple living of our coast--and, surely, for every one, everywhere, a
tonic in the performance of good deeds. Hard practice in fair and foul
weather worked a vast change in the doctor. Toil and fresh air are
eminent physicians. The wonder of salty wind and the hand-to-hand
conflict with a northern sea! They gave him health, a clear-eyed, brown,
deep-breathed sort of health, and restored a strength, broad-shouldered
and lithe and playful, that was his natural heritage. With this new
power came joyous courage, indomitability of purpose, a restless
activity of body and mind. He no longer carried the suggestion of a
wrecked ship; however afflicted his soul may still have been, he was
now, in manly qualities, the man the good God designed--strong and
bonnie and tender-hearted: betraying no weakness in the duties of the
day. His plans shot far beyond our narrow prospect, shaming our
blindness and timidity, when he disclosed them; and his
interests--searching, insatiable, reflective--comprehended all that
touched our work and way of life: so that, as Tom Tot was moved to
exclaim, by way of an explosion of amazement, 'twas not long before he
had mastered the fish business, gill, fin and liver. And he went