m the Children's Home.

With the lapse of years, however, even if Emile could see no better
with his eyes, his other faculties had developed so largely as to
surrender to him again the joy of independence of outside help, and
with characteristic self-reliance and optimism he once more tackled
his own difficulties.

I was recently visiting a small cottage, built on a tiny ledge under
the shadow of gloomy, high cliffs. It was far from any pathway and
only approachable by stumbling over huge rocks--the debris of the
crags behind. The hut had been built by a lonely old fellow who
resorted to it in summer because it was right on the fishing-grounds,
and he was getting unable any longer to face the long row to and from
his house in the harbour. Nowhere in the world is the old adage
concerning the birds of a feather truer than on this coast. The poorer
and lonelier a man is, the greater is the certainty that some other
poor and lonely person will seek the shelter of their poverty. Thus it
had been with old man Martin.

One day there had appeared at the cottage door from twenty miles
farther down the coast one-legged Ike, an irregular, angular youth,
who, stumbling over the hillside, and magnified into portentous
proportions by one of our Promethean fogs, had nearly scared the wits
out of even my trusty dog team. Quite without invitation from old man
Martin, one-legged Ike had come to stay. The proximity to the
fishing-grounds suited this seafarer, who shared in every particular
the limpet-like characteristics of Sinbad's Old Man of the Sea.

Anyhow, old Martin had never shaken him off, and had been heard to
excuse himself by saying, "After all, he can sit in a boat as well as
any of them with two legs." "Where there's room for one, there's room
for two," is almost an axiom of life on these shores. In the lapse of
time the old man had taken his last voyage, and Ike had come into full
possession of the estate, living almost like Robinson Crusoe, cut off
from his fellows by to him impassable barriers.

It was a reported lapse in some other portion of Ike's anatomy that
had led me to scramble along the landwash to the cottage. The ice
having broken up and gone out of the harbour, I should have considered
longer the advisability of the trip,--for the morning frosts left the
jagged rock masses at the foot of the cliff harbingers of ill omen to
the traveller,--had it not been that his isolation might possibly
make even trivial