the ground, and finding my foot in what felt like a vise.  I caught hold of a tree, and held on until it seemed as though my arms would be pulled out.  I yelled as loud as I could all the time, while the ’gator pulled.  He twisted my foot until I thought the bones must be broken, and that I must let go.  Then you came, Mark, and that’s all I remember until I was in the canoe, and you were paddling up the river.”

“Was that the first time you were ever in that canoe?” asked Mark, a new suspicion dawning in his mind.

“No; I had used her ’most every night, and one night I went as far as St. Mark’s in her.”

“What made you bring the canoe back at all?” asked Mrs. Elmer.

“’Cause everybody round here would have known her, and known that I had stole her if they’d seen me in her,” answered the boy.

“And did you shoot poor Bruce?” asked Ruth.

“Who’s Bruce?”

“Why, our dog.  He came to us more than a week ago, shot so bad that he could hardly walk.”

“Yes, I shot him because he wouldn’t go into the water and fetch out a duck I had wounded; but his name is Jack.  I didn’t kill him though, for I saw him on your back porch last Sunday when you were all over the river, and he barked at me.”

“My poor boy,” said Mrs. Elmer, “you have certainly done very wrong; but you have been severely punished for it, and if you are truly sorry and mean to try and do right in the future, you will as certainly be forgiven.”  So saying, the kind-hearted woman went over and sat down beside the boy, and took his hand in hers.

At this caress, the first he could ever remember to have received, the boy burst into tears, and sobbed out,

“I would have been good if I had a mother like you and a pleasant home like this.”

Mrs. Elmer soothed and quieted him, and gradually drew from him the rest of his story.  His father had once been comfortably well off, and had owned a large mill in Savannah; but during the war the mill had been burned, and he had lost everything.  For some years after that he was very poor, and when Frank was quite a small boy, and his sister a baby, his father used to drink, and when he came home drunk would beat him and his mother.  One night, after a terrible scene of this kind, which Frank could just remember, his mother had snatched up the baby and run from the house.  Afterwards he was told that they were dead; at any rate he never saw them again.  Then his father left Savannah and came to Florida to live.  He never drank any more, but was very cross, and hardly ever spoke to his son.  He made a living by doing jobs of carpentering; and, ever since he had been old enough, Frank had worked on their little farm, about twenty miles from Wakulla.  At last he became so tired of this sort of life, and his father’s harshness, that he determined to run away and try to find a happier one.

Mark and Ruth listened in silence to this story of an unhappy childhood, and when it was ended, Ruth went over to the sofa where her mother still sat, and taking Frank’s other hand in hers, said,