rmer. His shivering
ceased. The bitter chill of the first half hour after his fire went out
passed away, and in a little while to his astonishment he discovered
that he was not after all so uncomfortable.

"The snow must have covered me all up," he exclaimed with sudden
enlightenment, "and I'll be at the bottom of a big drift pretty soon,
and that's what's making me warm."

It was dark, and he struck a match to investigate, and sure enough,
every chink and crevice, even his door, was packed with snow, and not a
breath of air stirred within. Gradually the sound of the shrieking wind
and pounding sea seemed farther and farther away, and he heard it as one
hears something in the distance.

"Mother's going to be scared for me," he mused, as he rearranged his bed
of boughs. "She'll think I'm lost, and I'm sorry. She'll be all right
when I get home, though. It is a fine mess to get into."

Then his thoughts turned to Abel Zachariah and Skipper Ed and Jimmy,
somewhere out on the coast and weathering the same storm. But they had a
tent and a stove, and they would be comfortable enough, he had no doubt.

But there was the seal hunt. Winter had come to cut off the seal hunt
two weeks too soon, and they could scarcely have made a beginning. That
was a serious matter. The failure of the fishing season, now coupled
with an undoubted failure of the autumn seal hunt, would pinch them
harder than they had ever been pinched before. Without the seals they
would not be able to keep all of their dogs, and the dogs were a
necessity of their life.

All of these thoughts passed through Bobby's mind as he lay in the dense
darkness of his den. But he was young and he was optimistic, and
disturbing thoughts presently gave way to a picture of the snug little
cabin at the head of Abel's Bay and of its roaring fire in the big box
stove, and with the picture the sound of the storm drew farther and
farther away until it became at last one of Mrs. Abel's quaint Eskimo
lullabies, that she crooned to him when he was little, and Bobby slept.

And there under the snow drift he slept as peacefully as he could have
slept in his bed at home in the cabin at Abel's Bay, and just as
peacefully as he could ever have slept in a much finer bed in that misty
and forgotten past before he drifted down from the sea to be a part of
the life of the stern and desolate Labrador.

And so God prepares and tempers us, to our lot, and shows us how to be
happy and con