rship which she bestowed upon him. If he uttered a word of
disapprobation she would fling herself, like a cat, upon his crooked
shoulders and bend back his head until the red of her lips met his---
the pathos in her red-brown eyes quieting his qualms as to the dirt he
had to go through to get into bed.

In the mornings, either in summer or winter, he was obliged to tumble
the ragged girl from the roped cot he had made for her (when at last she
had reached an age too old to sleep with him), and force her, grumbling
the while, to eat the bacon and fish he had prepared. But he seemed
happy through it all, for the brown-eyed girl brought back to his mind
the slip of a fishermaid who had died when Tessibel was born. True,
there was more copper in the girl's hair and eyes than there had been
in the mother's--more of the bright burnishing like that of a polished
old-fashioned kettle hanging over the spigot in a tidy housewife's
kitchen. But Tessibel's one room was never tidy nor had she a kettle. In
one iron frying pan she cooked the fish and bacon, while a small tin
pail held the water for the tea. These were the only cooking utensils of
the hut.

Tess could climb to the top of the highest pine tree in the forest
yonder; she could squirm through the underbrush with the agility of a
rabbit. She loved every crawling, hateful thing, such as all honest
people despised, and she once fought with the son of an uphill farmer
for robbing a bird's nest, making him give up the eggs and restoring
them herself to the top of a pine tree in the fodder lot of Minister
Graves.

According to the ideas of all who knew her, save her father and Myra
Longman, Tessibel was full of eccentric traits; for who but Tess would
feel the "mollygrubs," as Ben Letts had said, at the wriggling of the
agonized perch and pickerel, as they flopped painfully upon the sands;
or who but Tess would mind the squeaking of the mother-bird calling for
her own. It was something of this "mollygrub" feeling that hastened her
dirt-caked feet, as she rounded the mud cellar near her father's hut,
and sped back of the weeping willow tree hanging in green fringes over
the cabin. She dropped quickly upon her knees before a large log, which
in some former time the flood-waters had dashed to its place.

Tessibel ran her red, bare arm into the hole in the end of the log. Then
she sat up and gazed around.

"He air gone," she said aloud, "he air gone. Ben Letts has took him,
da