g something that he wanted money for, and told Dr. Gale if he
gave it to him I would repay it. Do you _care_, father?"

Before he had a chance to get an answer in, David Bushnell stepped
forward, and, taking the little figure of his mother in his arms,
kissed her sharply, and walked away, to give some imaginary attention
to the Turtle at the bank.

"It is a fair land to work for!" spoke up Doctor Franklin, looking
about upon river and earth and sea; "worthy it is of our highest
efforts; of our lives, even, if need be. God give us strength as our
need _shall_ be."

With many a tug and pull and hearty heave-ho, the Turtle was hoisted
up the bank and safely drawn into the seine-house. The door was
locked, and Lady Fenwick's tomb gave forth no sound that night.

Doctor Franklin went his way to Boston. Doctor Gale returned to
Killingworth and his waiting patients, and the Bushnells, father,
mother and sons, having put the two gentlemen on the Saybrook shore,
went down the river into the Sound, along its edge, and up the small
Pochaug to their own home by the sycamore tree.

Mr. Bushnell and Ezra did the rowing that night. David's white hands
had, somehow, a new radiance in them for his father's eyes, and did
not seem exactly fitted for rowing just a common boat and every-day
oars.

The young man sat in the stern, beside his mother, one arm around her
waist, and the other clasped closely between her little palms, while,
now and then, her finding eyes would penetrate his consciousness with
a glance that seemed to say, "I always believed in you, David."

* * * * *

If you go to-day and stand upon the site of the old fort, built at the
mouth of the Connecticut River, in the year 1635, by Lion Gardiner,
once engineer in the service of the Prince of Orange, and search the
waters up and down for the island on which David Bushnell built the
American Turtle in 1775, you will not find it.

If you seek the oldest inhabitant of Saybrook, and ask him to point
out its locality, he will say, with boyhood's fondness for olden
play-grounds in his tone:

"Ah, yes! It is _Poverty_ Island that you mean. It used to be there,
but spring freshets and beating storms have washed it away."

The unexpected visit of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, to see the machine
David Bushnell was building, gave new force to that young gentleman's
confidence in his own powers of invention.

He worked with increased energy and ho