After we had explored the shore to our hearts’ content and were tired, we rested for a while in the shadow of some gnarled pitch-pines which stood close together, as near the sea as they dared.  They looked like a band of outlaws; they were such wild-looking trees.  They seemed very old, and as if their savage fights with the winter winds had made them hard-hearted.  And yet the little wild-flowers and the thin green grass-blades were growing fearlessly close around their feet; and there were some comfortable birds’-nests in safe corners of their rough branches.

When we went back to the house at the cove we had to wait some time for Mr. Dockum.  We succeeded in making friends with the children, and gave them some candy and the rest of our lunch, which luckily had been even more abundant than usual.  They looked thin and pitiful, but even in that lonely place, where they so seldom saw a stranger or even a neighbor, they showed that there was an evident effort to make them look like other children, and they were neatly dressed, though there could be no mistake about their being very poor.  One forlorn little soul, with honest gray eyes and a sweet, shy smile, showed us a string of beads which she wore round her neck; there were perhaps two dozen of them, blue and white, on a bit of twine, and they were the dearest things in all her world.  When we came away we were so glad that we could give the man more than he asked us for taking care of the horse, and his thanks touched us.

“I hope ye may never know what it is to earn every dollar as hard as I have.  I never earned any money as easy as this before.  I don’t feel as if I ought to take it.  I’ve done the best I could,” said the man, with the tears coming into his eyes, and a huskiness in his voice.  “I’ve done the best I could, and I’m willin’ and my woman is, but everything seems to have been ag’in’ us; we never seem to get forehanded.  It looks sometimes as if the Lord had forgot us, but my woman she never wants me to say that; she says He ain’t, and that we might be worse off,—­but I don’ know.  I haven’t had my health; that’s hendered me most.  I’m a boat-builder by trade, but the business’s all run down; folks buys ’em second-hand nowadays, and you can’t make nothing.  I can’t stand it to foller deep-sea fishing, and—­well, you see what my land’s wuth.  But my oldest boy, he’s getting ahead.  He pushed off this spring, and he works in a box-shop to Boston; a cousin o’ his mother’s got him the chance.  He sent me ten dollars a spell ago and his mother a shawl.  I don’t see how he done it, but he’s smart!”

This seemed to be the only bright spot in their lives, and we admired the shawl and sat down in the house awhile with the mother, who seemed kind and patient and tired, and to have great delight in talking about what one should wear.  Kate and I thought and spoke often of these people afterward, and when one day we met the man in Deephaven we sent some things to the children and his wife, and begged him to come to the house whenever he came to town; but we never saw him again, and though we made many plans for going again to the cove, we never did.  At one time the road was reported impassable, and we put off our second excursion for this reason and others until just before we left Deephaven, late in October.