uld live more agreeably, or even more
luxuriously, than in San Francisco in the '60's.

Here word was brought that Osbourne had been killed by the Indians,
and life began to bear heavily upon the young wife and mother,
stranded without means in a strange city. She put on widow's weeds and
looked about for employment with which to eke out her fast diminishing
store. When she was a little girl she had learned to do fine sewing on
the ruffles for her father's shirts, and had always made her own and
her child's dresses. This talent, which proved exceedingly useful at
various times in her life, now served her in good stead. She secured a
situation as fitter in a dressmaking establishment, where, on account
of her foreign looks, she was thought to be French.

Friends were not lacking, for many looked with pity upon the supposed
widow struggling to keep her head above water in a land so far from
her own home and family. During her absence at work she left the child
in the care of the kind-hearted landlady of the boarding-house and her
young son, Michael, still gratefully remembered as "Mackerel" by
Isobel. In the same boarding-house John Lloyd, the young Englishman of
the Reese River days, had also established himself. On Sundays, no
doubt to give the tired mother a long rest, he would take little Bel
to the beach out by old Fort Point, where he made swords for her out
of driftwood, played at Jack the Giant-Killer, and told stories about
Mr. and Mrs. Sea-Gull and what they said to each other. He even
borrowed fairy-tale books from the public library in order to learn
stories to tell his little friend on these Sunday outings. There came
a birthday, with very little to make it gay, but the kind-hearted
young man bought a small jointed doll with his meagre earnings, and
the mother made a set of beautiful clothes for it out of bits of
bright-coloured silks she had saved from her sewing. This, with a
little table whittled out of a cigar-box and a ten-cent set of dishes,
made a glorious day for the happy child. This friendship was
maintained in later years, and when the once poor clerk became a bank
president, Fanny Stevenson put her money in his bank.

So life went on for the mother and child until one eventful day, when
a tall, handsome man in high boots and a wide hat suddenly appeared at
the door, and crying out, "Is this my little girl?" caught her up in
his arms. As one risen from the dead, the husband and father had
return