he heavens, the trailing plumes of
a great benediction that lay on sea and shore. He scarcely recognized
the familiar landscape; a new bar had been formed in the river, and a
narrow causeway of sand that crossed the lagoon and marshes to the
river bank and the upland trail seemed to bring him nearer to humanity
again. He was conscious of a fresh, childlike delight in all this, and
when, a moment later, he saw the old uprooted tree, now apparently
forever moored and imbedded in the sand beside his cabin, he ran to it
with a sense of joy.

Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the long,
snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between two
crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact. As he walked
toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren sands had
borne before. Thinking it might be some strange sea bird caught in the
meshes of the sea-weed, he ran to the crate and looked within. It was
half filled with sea-moss and feathery algae. The cry was repeated.
He brushed aside the weeds with his hands. It was not a wounded sea
bird, but a living human child!

As he lifted it from its damp enwrappings he saw that it was an infant
eight or nine months old. How and when it had been brought there, or
what force had guided that elfish cradle to his very door, he could not
determine; but it must have been left early, for it was quite warm, and
its clothing almost dried by the blazing morning sun. To wrap his coat
about it, to run to his cabin with it, to start out again with the
appalling conviction that nothing could be done for it there, occupied
some moments. His nearest neighbor was Trinidad Joe, a "logger," three
miles up the river. He remembered to have heard vaguely that he was a
man of family. To half strangle the child with a few drops from his
whisky flask, to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out
into the river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an
hour he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and
from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence, and
a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his surmise as
to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.

The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished
room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five. With an
awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of his
finding t