so she stinted herself and saved, all unknown to her
darling Dean; and she had not clothing or fire enough to keep her warm
in the bleak winter, when the Dean was out, though she had a fine fire
when the Dean came back. All would have been well enough if the poor
woman had not, with her hard work and her efforts to save, become thin
and weak, and then grown sick with fever; and now there was nothing for
her but the hospital, for there was no money to pay for medicines, or
doctor's bills, to say nothing of rent and fire and clothes.

"And now for the first time the Dean began to realize the situation; and
a vague impression crossed his mind, that the poor, pale woman, now
restless with pain on a narrow bed in a great long ward of a dreary
hospital,--his own dear mother, suffering here with strange hands only
to comfort her,--had been brought to this for his sake; and when she
grew better, after a long, long time, but was still far from well, he
thought and thought, and cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and
wished that he might do something to show his gratitude, and make
amends.

"By and by he got into a factory, and worked there early and late, until
he too grew sick, and was carried to the hospital, and was laid beside
his poor sick mother, on a narrow bed. But he soon got well again,
though his mother did not, and then (he could do nothing else) he went
to sea as cabin-boy of a ship sailing to Havana; and he came back too;
and, with a proud heart beating in his little breast, he carried a
little purse of gold and silver coins that the captain gave him to his
poor sick mother; and then he went away again on the same ship, and came
back once more with another purse of money, twice as big as the first;
but the good captain that had been so kind to him, and rewarded him so
well, fell sick, and died of yellow fever on the passage home, and the
mate, who got command of the ship, being a different sort of man,
disliked the Dean, and told him not to come back any more. And so the
poor Dean didn't know what to do; until one of his old shipmates met him
in the street, and took him off to New Bedford, and shipped him as
cabin-boy of the _Blackbird_. 'And now here I am,' said the poor little
Dean, 'and all the rest you know,--cast away in the cold, in this awful
place, while my poor sick mother has no money and no friends in all the
world, and is thinking all the time what a wretch I am to run away and
desert her, when, G