for her--but never so that she could suspect--as bravely and as cheerily
as I could. And as she listened, and especially as she sang--how she
used to sing in those days!--there was no touch of pride in her face,
though the courage never died out, but appeal, appeal! I could have
cursed aloud the cause of her misery, or wept for the pity of it. Before
her baby was born he seemed to pull himself together, for he was
quite mad about her, and from the day the baby came--talk about
miracles!--from that day he never drank a drop. She gave the baby over
to him, and the baby simply absorbed him.

'He was a new man. He could not drink whisky and kiss his baby. And
the miners--it was really absurd if it were not so pathetic. It was the
first baby in Black Rock, and they used to crowd Mavor's shop and peep
into the room at the back of it--I forgot to tell you that when he
lost his position as manager he opened a hardware shop, for his people
chucked him, and he was too proud to write home for money--just for a
chance to be asked in to see the baby. I came upon Nixon standing at the
back of the shop after he had seen the baby for the first time, sobbing
hard, and to my question he replied: "It's just like my own." You can't
understand this. But to men who have lived so long in the mountains that
they have forgotten what a baby looks like, who have had experience of
humanity only in its roughest, foulest form, this little mite, sweet
and clean, was like an angel fresh from heaven, the one link in all that
black camp that bound them to what was purest and best in their past.

'And to see the mother and her baby handle the miners!

'Oh, it was all beautiful beyond words! I shall never forget the shock
I got one night when I found "Old Ricketts" nursing the baby. A drunken
old beast he was; but there he was sitting, sober enough, making