Tess of the Storm Country

The girl had not moved from beside the stone near which she had fallen. The night was so strange, so different from any night Tessibel had ever known. Her whole idea of life had been altered that day by the word of a fisherman, and the woman's heart grew larger and larger, until the squatter girl felt that it was going to burst. Something crawled over her bare foot and brought her to her senses. Leaning over she drew to her lap a long, slimy lizard, which she held caressingly in her fingers. She lifted him high up and looked at him through the moonlight.

"Green," she said slowly, "ain't he a dandy. But I don't dare carry him even a little way for fear he'll lose his house. I bet he has a pile of green babies."

Dropping the lizard beside the rock, she sped away.

Just before reaching the Longman cabin, she raised her voice and sang again, "Rescue the perishin', Care for the dyin'."

Some one opened the door and she bounded in.

"Glad ye come, Tessibel," said Mrs. Longman, a small wizened old woman. "The brat air sick to-day. He does nothin' but squall so that my head air a bustin' the hours through. Give him to Tessibel, Myry."

"After she air rested a spell," replied Myra, who resembled her mother, but was smaller and thinner. "He seems to have a pain, Tess."

"Mebbe he has," responded Tessibel, "give him to me."

The wee boy stopped his tears immediately. His back grew limp and his fists opened out as Tessibel began to sing. This time the song was, "Did ye ever go into an Irishman's shanty?"

The child fell asleep and Tessibel laid him gently in the box prepared for him. Bed room was scarce in the huts of the fishermen and the small members of the family slept on rope beds, let down from the ceiling. But Myra's child, still too tender and always sick, slept in a box which his grandfather, "Satisfied" Longman, had made for him as soon as he was born.

"It air a seemly night for the men to fish," commented Myra when Tessibel had seated herself again. "I air always a hopin' that nothin' will happen to none of them."

"The hull bunch air cute," assured Tessibel, "and Daddy can row faster than any man on this here lake."

"But when them game men gets after 'em with the permit to shoot, that's what I fears," complained Mrs. Longman--and she sighed.