The Mermaid | Page 8

houses, but they were not
very near.
Caius did not attempt to carve his inscription on the mutable sandstone.
It was quite possible to obtain a slab of hard building-stone and
material for cement, and after carting them himself rather secretly to
the place, he gradually hewed a deep recess for the tablet and cemented
it there, its face slanting upward to the blue sky for greater safety. He
knew even then that the soft rock would not hold it many years, but it
gave him a poetic pleasure to contemplate the ravages of time as he
worked, and to think that the dimpled child with the sunny hair and the
sad, beautiful eyes had only gone before, that his tablet would some
time be washed away by the same devouring sea, and that in the sea of
time he, too, would sink before many years and be forgotten.
The short elegy he wrote was a bad mixture of ancient and modern
thought as to substance, figures, and literary form, for the boy had just
been dipping into classics at school, while he was by habit of mind a

Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian
angel must have smiled had they viewed it; but perhaps they would
have wept too, for it was the outcome of a heart very young and very
earnest, wholly untaught in that wisdom which counsels to evade the
pains and suck the pleasures of circumstance.
There were only two people who discovered what Caius was about, and
came to look on while his work was yet unfinished.
One was an old man who lived in the one poor cottage not far away and
did light work for Day the farmer. His name was Morrison--Neddy
Morrison he was called. He came more than once, creeping carefully
near the edge of the cliff with infirm step, and talking about the lost
child, whom he also had loved, about the fearful visitation of the
mother's madness, and, with Caius, condemning unsparingly the
brutality, known and supposed, of the now bereaved father. It was a
consolation to them both that Morrison could state that this youngest
child was the only member of his family for whom Day had ever
shown affection.
The other visitor Caius had was Jim Hogan. He was a rough youth; he
had a very high, rounded forehead, so high that he would have almost
seemed bald if the hair, when it did at last begin, had not been
exceedingly thick, standing in a short red brush round his head. With
the exception of this peculiar forehead, Jim was an ordinary freckled,
healthy young man. He saw no sense at all in what Caius was doing.
When he came he sat himself down on the edge of the cliff, swung his
heels, and jeered unfeignedly.
When the work was finished it became noised that the tablet was to be
seen. The neighbours wondered not a little, and flocked to gaze and
admire. Caius himself had never told of its existence; he would have
rather no one had seen it; still, he was not insensible to the local fame
thus acquired. His father, it was true, had not much opinion of his feat,
but his mother, as mothers will, treasured all the admiring remarks of
the neighbours. All the women loved Caius from that day forth, as
being wondrously warm-hearted. Such sort of literary folk as the
community could boast dubbed him "The Canadian Burns," chiefly, it

seemed, because he had been seen to help his father at the ploughing.
In due course the wife of the farmer Day was tried for murder, and
pronounced insane. She had before been removed to an asylum: she
now remained there.
CHAPTER V.
SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES.
It was foreseen by the elder Simpson that his son would be a great man.
He looked forth over the world and decided on the kind of greatness.
The wide, busy world would not have known itself as seen in the mind
of this gray-haired countryman. The elder Simpson had never set foot
off the edge of his native island. His father before him had tilled the
same fertile acres, looked out upon the same level landscape--red and
green, when it was not white with snow. Neither of them had felt any
desire to see beyond the brink of that horizon; but ambition, quiet and
sturdy, had been in their hearts. The result of it was the bit of money in
the bank, the prosperous farm, and the firm intention of the present
farmer that his son should cut a figure in the world.
This stern man, as he trudged about at his labour, looked upon the
activities of city life with that same inward eye with which the maiden