to time, and administer the restoratives
which the physician had got ready, all as naturally and easily as if he
had been bred a nurse, vastly to his own surprise, and with not a little
gain to his self-appreciation. He was a serviceable kind of body on
occasion, after all, was he not, hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to
himself.

At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the slumbering
household to receive back the wanderer.

It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous
guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of
petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at the
door.

But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking bundle
of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in
silence. When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the
old master, she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved,
and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing back only what had
once been Myrtle Hazard. She screamed aloud,--so wildly that Myrtle
lifted her head from the pillow against which she had rested it, and
started forward.

The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it was
the girl she loved, and not her ghost. Then it all came over her,--she
had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by night, and been
rescued by the brave old man who had brought her back. What crying and
kisses and prayers and blessings were poured forth, in a confusion
of which her bodily costume was a fitting type, those who know the
vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race may imagine better
than we could describe it.

The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative. There
were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she was
to have could be settled. What they were, it is needless to suggest; but
while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her "responsibility"
was removed, then with a fair share of pity and kindness, and other
lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for an explanation before
giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put the essential facts before
them in a few words. She had gone down the river some miles in her boat,
which was upset by a rush of the current, and she had come very near
being drowned. She was got out, however, by a person living near b