luded, "after all that----mother has told me, how
can I doubt? But now, daddy--I may call you that, mayn't I?"

"The Golden Shoemaker" pressed convulsively the little hand he held.

"That is what Marian--what you always called me when you were a child, my
dear. Nothing would please me better."

"Then 'daddy' it shall be. And now, do you know, daddy, I'm beginning
to remember things in a vague sort of way. I'm just like some one waking
up after a good sleep. Things, you know, that happened before one went
to sleep, come back by degrees at such a time; and, in the same way,
recollections are growing on me now of my childhood, and especially of the
time when I was lost. Let me see, now! I'm like some one looking into a
magic crystal to see the future, only I want to recall the past. After
thinking very hard, I've been able to call up some remembrance of the day
I ran away from home. I seem to remember being very angry with someone,
and wanting to get away. Then there was a woman, and a man, but chiefly
a woman, and some dark place that I was in. And I think they must have
treated me badly in some way."

"Cobbler" Horn thought for a moment.

"Why," he said, "that dark place must have been the wood, on the other
side of the field where I found your shoe."

"Yes, no doubt; and wasn't it in that wood that you picked up the string
of my sun-bonnet?"

"To be sure it was!"

"Yes; and perhaps it was there that I was stripped of my clothes. When I
fell into the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Burton, my chief garment was an old
ragged shawl. My one shoe, and my socks, and my sun-bonnet, were almost
all I had besides. I've kept all the things except the socks, and you must
see them by and bye, daddy."

"Of course I must."

But, having found his child, he did not greatly care just now about
anything else.

Presently she spoke again.

"Daddy!"

"Yes, Marian?"

"I'm so thankful it has turned out to be you!"

"Yes, my dear?" responded the happy father, in a tone of enquiry.

"I mean I'm glad it's you who are my father. It might have been somebody
quite different, you know."

"Yes," he answered again, with a beaming face.

"I'm glad, you know, daddy, just because you're exactly the kind of father
I want--that's all."

"And I also am glad that it is you, little one," he responded. "And how
thankful we ought to be that we learnt to love one another before getting
to know who we were!"

"Yes," she said, "it would have been