less than insanity; something that might happen to a common,
unintellectual sort of person. He remembered the loon, an ungainly
feathered neighbor, that was popularly supposed to have lent its
name to the adjective. Could it be possible that people looked
upon him as one too hopelessly and uninterestingly afflicted for
sympathy or companionship, too unimportant and common for even
ridicule; or was this but the coarse interpretation of that vulgar
girl?

Nevertheless, the next morning "after sun up" James North was at
Trinidad Joe's cabin. That worthy proprietor himself--a long, lank
man, with even more than the ordinary rural Western characteristics
of ill health, ill feeding, and melancholy--met him on the bank,
clothed in a manner and costume that was a singular combination of
the frontiersman and the sailor. When North had again related the
story of his finding the child, Trinidad Joe pondered.

"It mout hev been stowed away in one of them crates for safe-
keeping," he said, musingly, "and washed off the deck o' one o'
them Tahiti brigs goin' down fer oranges. Least-ways, it never got
thar from these parts."

"But it's a miracle its life was saved at all. It must have been
some hours in the water."

"Them brigs lays their course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a
toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all! And ez to the
child keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o'
things," continued Joe, in sententious cynicism. "Ef an able
seaman had fallen from the yard-arm that night he'd been sunk in