metimes, and I tell you, Ruey, that sort makes powerful
Christians."

At that moment the old pair entered the door. Zephaniah Pennel came and
stood quietly by the pillow where the little form was laid, and lifted a
corner of the blanket. The tiny head was turned to one side, showing the
soft, warm cheek, and the little hand was holding tightly a morsel of
the flannel blanket. He stood swallowing hard for a few moments. At last
he said, with deep humility, to the wise and mighty woman who held her,
"I'll tell you what it is, Miss Roxy, I'll give all there is in my old
chest yonder if you'll only make her--live."

CHAPTER V

THE KITTRIDGES

It did live. The little life, so frail, so unprofitable in every mere
material view, so precious in the eyes of love, expanded and flowered at
last into fair childhood. Not without much watching and weariness. Many
a night the old fisherman walked the floor with the little thing in his
arms, talking to it that jargon of tender nonsense which fairies bring
as love-gifts to all who tend a cradle. Many a day the good little old
grandmother called the aid of gossips about her, trying various
experiments of catnip, and sweet fern, and bayberry, and other teas of
rustic reputation for baby frailties.

At the end of three years, the two graves in the lonely graveyard were
sodded and cemented down by smooth velvet turf, and playing round the
door of the brown houses was a slender child, with ways and manners so
still and singular as often to remind the neighbors that she was not
like other children,--a bud of hope and joy,--but the outcome of a great
sorrow,--a pearl washed ashore by a mighty, uprooting tempest. They that
looked at her remembered that her father's eye had never beheld her, and
her baptismal cup had rested on her mother's coffin.

She was small of stature, beyond the wont of children of her age, and
moulded with a fine waxen delicacy that won admiration from all eyes.
Her hair was curly and golden, but her eyes were dark like her mother's,
and the lids drooped over them in that manner which gives a peculiar
expression of dreamy wistfulness. Every one of us must remember eyes
that have a strange, peculiar expression of pathos and desire, as if the
spirit that looked out of them were pressed with vague remembrances of a
past, or but dimly comprehended the mystery of its present life. Even
when the baby lay in its cradle, and its dark, inquiring eyes would
follow no