of poor
parents.

This had been the reasoning among the Fellness busybodies ever since
Coomber had announced his intention of taking the little girl home; but
he was as obstinate in this as in most other things. He had followed his
own will, or rather the God-like compassion of his own heart, in spite
of the poverty that surrounded him, and the hard struggle he often had
to get bread enough for his own children.

"I'll just have to stay out a bit longer, or go out in the boat a bit
oftener," he said, with a light laugh, when they attempted to reason him
out of his project. He did not know then that the days of his boat were
numbered; but he knew it now--knew that starvation stared them in the
face, and at no distant date either. He could never hope to buy a new
boat. It would cost over twenty pounds, and he seldom owned twenty pence
over the day's stock of bread and other household necessaries. Among
these he counted his whisky; for that a fisherman could do his work
without a daily supply of ardent spirits never entered his head. Blue
ribbon armies and temperance crusades had never been heard of, and it
was a fixed belief among the fisher folk that a man could not work
without drinking as well as eating, and drinking deeply, too.

So Coomber never thought of curtailing his daily allowance of grog to
meet the additional expense of his household: he rather increased the
allowance, that he might be able to work the boat better, as he fancied,
and so catch more fish. When he forgot his bottle and left it at
Fellness, it struck him as something all but marvellous that he should
be able to work the next day without his usual drams, but it had not
convinced him that he could do without it all together. Of its effect
upon himself, in making him sullen, morose, and disagreeable, he was in
absolute ignorance, and so the children's talk about it came upon him as
a revelation. He knew that Tiny sometimes shrank from and avoided him;
but he had considered it a mere childish whim, not to be accounted for
by anything in himself; and so to hear that she was absolutely afraid of
him sometimes was something to make him think more deeply than he had
ever done in his life before.

But he did not say a word to Tiny about this. When he had done rubbing
his gun he carried it home, and Tiny was left free to make acquaintance
with the farm children.

She walked shyly up to where they were sitting--Polly reading, and Harry
throwing sand