Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/467



was late in the autumn of that year, and upon a lonely moor in Scotland, that a poor old woman stood shivering in the cold wind. She was outside of a miserable little hut, in the doorway of which stood, two men.

For five or six years she had lived alone in that little hut.

It was a very poor place, but it kept out the wind and the rain and the snow, and it was a home to her, and for the greater part of these years in which she had lived there alone, she had received,, at irregular and sometimes long intervals, sums of money, often very small and never large, from her son, who was a sailorman upon seas of which she did not even know the name.

But for many months no money had come from this wandering son, and it was very little that she had been able to earn. Sometimes she might have starved, had it not been for the charity of others almost as poor as she. As for rent, it had been due for a long time, and at last it had been due so long that her landlord felt that further forbearance would be not only unprofitable, but that it would serve as a bad example to his 451