other?"

"No, Dorothy; this poor child is no captive from the wilderness," he
replied. "The heathen savage would have given him to eat of his scanty
morsel and to drink of his birchen cup, but Christian men, alas! had
cast him out to die." Then he told her how he had found him beneath
the gallows, upon his father's grave, and how his heart had prompted
him like the speaking of an inward voice to take the little outcast
home and be kind unto him. He acknowledged his resolution to feed and
clothe him as if he were his own child, and to afford him the
instruction which should counteract the pernicious errors hitherto
instilled into his infant mind.

Dorothy was gifted with even a quicker tenderness than her husband,
and she approved of all his doings and intentions.

"Have you a mother, dear child?" she inquired.

The tears burst forth from his full heart as he attempted to reply,
but Dorothy at length understood that he had a mother, who like the
rest of her sect was a persecuted wanderer. She had been taken from
the prison a short time before, carried into the uninhabited
wilderness and left to perish there by hunger or wild beasts. This was
no uncommon method of disposing of the Quakers, and they were
accustomed to boast that the inhabitants of the desert were more
hospitable to them than civilized man.

"Fear not, little boy; you shall not need a mother, and a kind one,"
said Dorothy, when she had gathered this information. "Dry your tears,
Ilbrahim, and be my child, as I will be your mother."

The good woman prepared the little bed from which her own children had
successively been borne to another resting-place. Before Ilbrahim
would consent to occupy it he knelt down, and as Dorothy listed to his
simple and affecting prayer she marvelled how the parents that had
taught it to him could have been judged worthy of death. When the boy
had fallen asleep, she bent over his pale and spiritual countenance,
pressed a kiss upon his white brow, drew the bedclothes up about his
neck, and went away with a pensive gladness in her heart.

Tobias Pearson was not among the earliest emigrants from the old
country. He had remained in England during the first years of the
Civil War, in which he had borne some share as a cornet of dragoons
under Cromwell. But when the ambitious designs of his leader began to
develop themselves, he quitted the army of the Parliament and sought a
refuge from the strife which was no longer holy amon