w your reason." "I guess most anybody'd done it,
stranger," answered Trapp. "Like's you'd be done by, you know, ef
you'd ha' been me, wouldn't you?"

"No, I'll be hanged if I would!" broke out Field. "But look here,
friends: you think he threw me down. He did not: I jumped off myself.
He did not touch me."

"Oh, God bless you!" cried the bowed old wife, her worn face turning
radiant upon him and bright drops starting in the dull old eyes. They
were almost the first words he had heard her speak. Though she had
been very attentive to him all along, she had done it almost in
silence and with an averted face. Her voice was high and almost sweet.
Field talked on then, and told them several things at which they both
fell to crying like children. He took out one bill from the roll on
the table and made the old man take the rest. "I do not pretend that
money can pay what I owe you," he said, "but what I have you must let
me give you for my own satisfaction."

During the next few days, while he gathered his strength, our friend
sat about the house in the sunny places and took a strong liking for
the simple, kind old wife, and told her by degrees the story of his
life and his friends. In that wonderful air he rallied like magic.
He took longer and longer walks, keeping well out of sight of prying
eyes, though the place was retired enough, for that. Thursday morning
of that week he borrowed some clothes of the farmer and made a bundle
of his own. He bade the old couple good-bye, not without regret on
either side. As the Wanita ploughed up the lake that day on her return
trip, a man came down from the hurricane-deck into the cabin, sat by
the table and took up a magazine lying there and turned it over.
He was dressed in coarse, ill-fitting, homespun clothes, and had a
newly-healed scar on his forehead. His upper lip was roughly shorn,
and the rest of his face covered with a two or three weeks' beard. He
was not an attractive-looking person, certainly, and yet the pretty
girl sewing by the window, her face quite wan and worn-looking now,
glanced at him many times in a flurried, nervous way; and when he was
gone she went and took up the old magazine, opened it where a leaf was
turned down, and read these lines of an old-fashioned ballad:

Oh, alone and alorn, as the night came down,
Sir Reginald walked on the wet sea-sands;
And all as he walked came Marianne,
King's daughter of all those lands.

That evening, as th