We’re a people of presentiments down here on the Flats, and well we may be.  You’d own up yourself, maybe, if in the dark of the night, you locked in sleep, there’s a knock on the door enough to wake the dead, and you start up and listen and nothing follows; and falling back, you’re just dozing off, and there it is once more, so that the lad in the next room cries out, “Who’s that, mother?” No one answering, you’re half lost again, when rap comes the hand again, the loudest of the three, and you spring to the door and open it, and there’s nought there but a wind from the graves blowing in your face; and after a while you learn that in that hour of that same night your husband was lost at sea.  Well, that happened to Mrs. Devereux.  And I haven’t time to tell you the warnings I’ve known of.  As for Faith, I mind that she said herself, as we were in the boat for that clear midnight sail, that the sea had a spite against her, but third time was trying time.

So Faith grew up, and Dan sent her to school what he could, for he set store by her.  She was always ailing,—­a little, wilful, pettish thing, but pretty as a flower; and folks put things into her head, and she began to think she was some great shakes; and she may have been a matter of seventeen years old when Mrs. Devereux died.  Dan, as simple at twenty-six as he had been ten years before, thought to go on just in the old way, but the neighbors were one too many for him; and they all represented that it would never do, and so on, till the poor fellow got perplexed and vexed and half beside himself.  There wasn’t the first thing she could do for herself, and he couldn’t afford to board her out, for Dan was only a laboring-man, mackerelling all summer and shoemaking all winter, less the dreadful times when he stayed out on the Georges; and then he couldn’t afford, either, to keep her there and ruin the poor girl’s reputation;—­and what did Dan do but come to me with it all?

Now for a number of years I’d been up in the other part of the town with Aunt Netty, who kept a shop that I tended between schools and before and after, and I’d almost forgotten there was such a soul on earth as Dan Devereux,—­though he’d not forgotten me.  I’d got through the Grammar and had a year in the High, and suppose I should have finished with an education and gone off teaching somewhere, instead of being here now, cheerful as heart could wish, with a little black-haired hussy tiltering on the back of my chair.—­Rolly, get down!  Her name’s Laura,—­for his mother.—­I mean I might have done all this, if at that time mother hadn’t been thrown on her back, and been bedridden ever since.  I haven’t said much about mother yet, but there all the time she was, just as she is to-day, in her little tidy bed in one corner of the great kitchen, sweet as a saint, and as patient; and I had to come and keep house for father.  He never meant that I should lose by it, father didn’t; begged, borrowed, or stolen, bought or hired, I should have