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“One summer there come a feller from Boston to fish. He brought his wife along, and T used to go out with both o’ ’em. The man’s wife was puttin’ up for some o’ them children’s homes, and she used to talk to Marm Marvin about takin’ one o’ the children and what a comfort it would be to the child to git out into the fresh air, and one mornin’ ‘fore she left she took Jed down in the woods and talked to him, and the week after she left for home Marm Marvin sent me over to the station–same place I fetched ye–and out she got with a tag sewed on her jacket and her name on it, and a bundle o’ clothes no bigger’n your head. She was ’bout seven or eight years old, and the cunnin’est young un ye ever see. Jus’ the same eyes she’s got now, only they looked bigger, ’cause her cheeks was caved in.”

“Not Ruby, Jim!” I cried, in astonishment.

“Yes, Ruby. That’s what was on the tag.”

“And she isn’t Marvin’s child?”

“No more’n she’s yourn, nor mine. She ain’t nobody’s child that anybody knows about. She’s jus’ Ruby, and that’s all there is to her.

“Well, by the time I’d got her out to the farm and had heared her talk and seen her clap her hands at the chippies, and laugh at the birds, and go half wild over every little thing she’d see, I knowed I’d got hold o’ something that filled up every crack o’ my heart. And she didn’t come a day too soon, for Jed had got so ugly there warn’t no livin’ with him, and I’d made up my mind to quit, and I would if he hadn’t took a streak ag’in Ruby at the start. Then I knowed where my trail led. And arter that I never let her out o’ my sight. Marm Marvin was different. She never had no child o’ her own, and she warmed up to Ruby more’n more every day, and she loves her now much as she kin love anything.

“That fust winter we had a good deal o’ snow and I made a pair o’ leggins for her out o’ a deer’s skin I’d killed, and rigged up a sled, and I’d haul her after me wherever I went, and when school opened down to the cross-roads I’d haul her down and bring her back if the snow warn’t too deep, and when summer come she’d go ‘long jus’ the same. I taught her to fish and shoot, and often she’d stay out in camp with me all night when I was tendin’ the sugar-maples–she sleepin’ on the balsams with my coat throwed over her.

“Things went on this way till ’bout three years ago, when I see she warn’t gittin’ ahead fast as she could, and I went for the old man to send her to school down to Plymouth. Marm Marvin was willin’, but Jed held out, and at last he give in after my talkin’ to him. So I hooked up the buck-board and drove her down to Plymouth and left her, with her arms ’round my neck and the tears streamin’ down her face. But she was game all the same, only she hated to have me leave her.

“Every July and Christmas I’d go for her, and she’d allus be waitin’ for me at the head o’ the stairs or would come runnin’ down with her arms wide open, and she’d kiss me and hug me and call me dear Uncle Jim, and tell me how she loved me, and how there warn’t nothin’ in the world she loved so much; and then when she’d git home we’d tramp the woods together every chance we got.”

Jim stopped and bent forward, his face in his hands, his elbows on his knees. For a time he was silent; then he went on: