e. He could do the things that they were doing, and they sang while they
went to and from their work.

It was the reviving spirit in him that opened his eyes to the lowly joys
surrounding him. He found himself thinking with surprising interest that
he could do what these men were doing and do it well, and after all what
more can be expected of a man than that he should do some one thing well?
He did not realise at the time that this small, mean ambition to surpass
these bold fishermen was nothing less than the resurrection of dead hopes.

And so, when Simmy Dodge walked in upon him one day, expecting to find a
beaten, discouraged skulker, he was confronted by a sun-browned, bare-
armed, bright-eyed warrior whose smile was that of the man who never
laughs,--the grim smile of him who thinks.

The lines in his face had deepened under the influence of sun and wind;
there was a new, almost unnatural ruggedness about the man Simmy had seen
less than two months before. The cheeks had the appearance of being sunken
and there was an even firmer look to the strong chin and jaws than in the
so recent past. Simmy looked at this new, hardy face and wondered whether
two months in the rough world would do as much in proportion for his own
self-despised countenance.

Thorpe had been up since five o'clock in the morning. For two weeks he had
started off every morning at that hour with his landlord for the
timberlands above the town, where they spent the day hewing out the sills
and beams for a new boat-house. Unskilled at such labor, his duties were
not those of the practised workman, but rather those of the "handy man"
upon whom falls the most arduous tasks as a rule. Thorpe's sinews were
strained to the utmost in handling the long, unwieldy trunks of the fallen
trees; his hands were blistered and his legs bruised, but the splendid
muscles were no longer sore, nor was he so fatigued at day's-end that he
could have "dropped in his tracks" right joyfully,--as he had felt like
doing in the first week of his toiling.

"Well, I'll be jiggered," said Simmy, still holding Thorpe's hand as he
backed away from him the better to take in this new and strange creature
in overalls. Thorpe and his grizzled host had just come down from the
woods with a load of pine logs, and had found the trim, immaculate little
New Yorker waiting for them at the breakwater, directed thither by the
housewife in the winding lane that was called High Street. "By the