of the time: a credulous, nervous woman,--the
one idea in her narrow brain a passionate love for her husband and
children.

After the three who had "gone away" were buried in the little Catholic
graveyard by the creek, the others crept closer together. Joe, nearest
Ellen in age, was kept at home to help with the house-and yard-work,
and, partly from being a simple-minded fellow, and partly to humor
Ellen, fell into her girl's ways. "Joe and me," she said, "churned and
cooked together, and then he'd bring his tools into mother's room and
work. We liked that, he was so full of joking and whistling."

The old man was quieter after his children's death. One day the
machinery at the mill, being old and rotten, broke; the hands were at
work in it, underneath the beams which fell. An hour after, just as
Ellen and Joe had put the chairs about the supper-table, and sat waiting
for their father and Jim, the door was pushed open, and two heaps,
shapeless, and covered closely with a quilt, were brought in upon a
door. Whatever was the pain or loss of the widow or Joe, they had no
time to indulge it; Ellen needed all their care after that for a year or
two. She was "troubled," was all the satisfaction they gave to the
neighbors' curiosity, who never saw her in that time.

In the second autumn, however, she began to go about again through the
village; and Joe, after watching her anxiously for some time, found work
as a hand on a schooner running to Sandusky, Ohio. This was in the
autumn of 1860. Once in a while, during the winter, he came home to stay
over-night. "Often," Ellen said, "when Joe came, we hadn't seen anybody
cross the doorstep since he went out of it, mother and I lived alone so
much; but mother, in her worst days with pain, had a joking, laughing
way with her that kept it pleasant in-doors."

The Carrols were noted as being a scrupulously clean folk; so it is
probable that the little kitchen and bed-room were still the best idea
Joe had of the world,--knowing nothing beyond, indeed, but the schooner
and the deck of the wharf-boat in Sandusky. To understand what follows,
you must remember the utter ignorance dominant in such fishing-stations
as Coldwater. The poorer inhabitants, who stared at Ellen as she went
down to the beach for water, were Irish and Dutch emigrants, forwarded
there like cattle, who had settled down, sold their fish to the
trading-vessels, and never had looked outside of that to know they were
n