unds, it's meself that would hev laid down on the say shore and
takin' the salt waves for me blankits. But it's sivinteen miles I've
walked this blessed noight, with nothin' to sustain me, and hevin' a
mortal wakeness to fight wid in me bowels, by reason of starvation, and
only a bit o' baccy that the Widdy Maloney gi' me at the cross roads,
to kape me up entoirley. But it was the dark day I left me home in
Milwaukee to walk to Boston; and if ye'll oblige a lone man who has
left a wife and six children in Milwaukee, wid the loan of twenty-five
cints, furninst the time he gits worruk, God'll be good to ye."

It instantly flashed through my mind that the man before me had the
previous night partaken of the kitchen hospitality of my little
cottage, two miles away. That he presented himself in the guise of a
distressed fisherman, mulcted of his wages by an inhuman captain; that
he had a wife lying sick of consumption in the next village, and two
children, one of whom was a cripple, wandering in the streets of
Boston. I remembered that this tremendous indictment against Fortune
touched the family, and that the distressed fisherman was provided with
clothes, food, and some small change. The food and small change had
disappeared, but the garments for the consumptive wife, where were
they? He had been using them for a pillow.

I instantly pointed out this fact, and charged him with the deception.
To my surprise, he took it quietly, and even a little complacently.

"Bedad, yer roight; ye see, sur" (confidentially), "ye see, sur, until
I get worruk--and it's worruk I'm lukin' for--I have to desave now and
thin to shute the locality. Ah, God save us! but on the say-coast
thay'r that har-rud upon thim that don't belong to the say."

I ventured to suggest that a strong, healthy man like him might have
found work somewhere between Milwaukee and Boston.

"Ah, but ye see I got free passage on a freight train, and didn't
sthop. It was in the Aist that I expected to find worruk."

"Have you any trade?"

"Trade, is it? I'm a brickmaker, God knows, and many's the lift I've
had at makin' bricks in Milwaukee. Shure, I've as aisy a hand at it as
any man. Maybe yer honor might know of a kill hereabout?"

Now to my certain knowledge, there was not a brick kiln within fifty
miles of that spot, and of all unlikely places to find one would have
been this sandy peninsula, given up to the summer residences of a few
wealthy people.