hat dinner, darlint," came a
woman's voice. "What kept ye? Stumpy was tired, was he? Well, niver
mind."

The woman lifted the little fellow in her arms, pushed back his cap
and smoothed his hair with her fingers, her whole face beaming with
tenderness.

"Gimme the crutch, darlint, and hold on to me tight, and we'll get
under the shed out of the sun till I see what Jennie's sent me." At this
instant she caught Babcock's eye.

"Oh, it's the boss. Sure, I thought ye'd gone back. Pull the hat off
ye, me boy; it's the boss we're workin' for, the man that's buildin' the
wall. Ye see, sir, when I'm driv' like I am to-day, I can't go home to
dinner, and me Jennie sends me--big--man--Patsy--down"--rounding out
each word in a pompous tone, as she slipped her hand under the boy's
chin and kissed him on the cheek.

After she had propped him between two big spars, she lifted the cover of
the tin pail.

"Pigs' feet, as I'm alive, and hot cabbage, and the coffee a-b'ilin'
too!" she said, turning to the boy and pulling out a tin flask with a
screw top, the whole embedded in the smoking cabbage. "There, we'll be
after puttin' it where Stumpy can't be rubbin' his nose in it"--setting
the pail, as she spoke, on a rough anchor-stone.

Here the goat moved up, rubbing his head in the boy's face, and then
reaching around for the pail.

"Look at him, Patsy! Git out, ye imp, or I'll hurt ye! Leave that kiver
alone!" She laughed as she struck at the goat with her empty gauntlet,
and shrank back out of the way of his horns.

There was no embarrassment over her informal dinner, eaten as she sat
squat in a fence-corner, an anchor-stone for a table, and a pile of
spars for a chair. She talked to Babcock in an unabashed, self-possessed
way, pouring out the smoking coffee in the flask cup, chewing away on
the pigs' feet, and throwing the bones to the goat, who sniffed them
contemptuously. "Yes, he's the youngest of our children, sir. He and
Jennie--that's home, and 'most as tall as meself--are all that's left.
The other two went to heaven when they was little ones."

"Can't the little fellow's leg be straightened?" asked Babcock, in a
tone which plainly showed his sympathy for the boy's suffering.

"No, not now; so Dr. Mason says. There was a time when it might have
been, but I couldn't take him. I had him over to Quarantine again two
years ago, but it was too late; it'd growed fast, they said. When he
was four years old he would be under