As he lifted it from its damp enwrappings he saw that it was an
infant eight or nine months old. How and when it had been brought
there, or what force had guided that elfish cradle to his very
door, he could not determine; but it must have been left early, for
it was quite warm, and its clothing almost dried by the blazing
morning sun. To wrap his coat about it, to run to his cabin with
it, to start out again with the appalling conviction that nothing
could be done for it there, occupied some moments. His nearest
neighbor was Trinidad Joe, a "logger," three miles up the river.
He remembered to have heard vaguely that he was a man of family.
To half strangle the child with a few drops from his whisky flask,
to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out into the
river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an hour
he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and
from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence,
and a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his
surmise as to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.

The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished
room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five. With an
awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of
his finding the infant, and the object of his visit. Before he had
finished, the woman, by some feminine trick, had taken the child
from his hands ere he knew it; and when he paused, out of breath,
burst into a fit of laughter. North tried to laugh too, but
failed.

When the woman had wiped the tears from a pair of very frank blue
eyes, and hidden two rows of very strong white teeth again, she