an. In the
days when that punctilious worthy set himself to observe the doings of
his elder brother at Ballure, he found it convenient to make an outwork
of the hedge in front of the thatched house that stood nearest. Two
persons lived in the cottage, father and daughter--Tom Quilliam, usually
called Black Tom, and Bridget Quilliam, getting the name of Bridget
Black Tom.

The man was a short, gross creature, with an enormous head and a big,
open mouth, showing broken teeth that were black with the juice of
tobacco. The girl was by common judgment and report a gawk--a great,
slow-eyed, comely-looking, comfortable, easy-going gawk. Black Tom was
a thatcher, and with his hair poking its way through the holes in his
straw hat, he tramped the island in pursuit of his calling. This kept
him from home for days together, and in that fact Peter Christian, while
shadowing the morality of his brother, found his own opportunity.

When the child was born, neither the thatcher nor his daughter attempted
to father it. Peter Christian paid twenty pounds to the one and eighty
to the other in Manx pound-notes, the boys daubed their door to show
that the house was dishonoured, and that was the end of everything.

The girl went through her "censures" silently, or with only one comment.
She had borrowed the sheet in which she appeared in church from Miss
Christian of Ballawhaine, and when she took it back, the good soul of
the sweet lady thought to improve the occasion.

"I was wondering, Bridget," she said gravely, "what you were thinking of
when you stood with Bella and Liza before the congregation last Sunday
morning"--two other Magda-lenes had done penance by Bridget's side.

"'Deed, mistress," said the girl, "I was thinkin' there wasn't a sheet
at one of them to match mine for whiteness. I'd 'a been ashamed to be
seen in the like of theirs."

Bridget may have been a gawk, but she did two things which were not
gawkish. Putting the eighty greasy notes into the foot of an old
stocking, she sewed them up in the ticking of her bed, and then
christened her baby Peter. The money was for the child if she should not
live to rear him, and the name was her way of saying that a man's son
was his son in spite of law or devil.

After that she kept both herself and her child by day labour in the
fields, weeding and sowing potatoes, and following at the tail of the
reapers, for sixpence a day dry days, and fourpence all weathers. She
might hav