not know, you do not know! I am growing old, and my hands and eyes are
not what they were. That very night when I came home and found you
there, I had just lost overboard my last supplies, stored so long,
husbanded so carefully! If I could walk, I would show you my cellar
and storehouse back in the woods.

'Many things that they have held were honestly earned, by my fish and
my game, and one thing and another. I get out timber and raft it down
to the islands sometimes, although the work is too hard for an old man
alone; and I trade my furs off regularly at the settlements on the
islands and even along the mainland,--a month's work for a little
flour or sugar. Ah, how I have labored! I have felt my muscles crack,
I have dropped like a log from sheer weariness. Talk of tortures;
which of them have I not felt, with the pains and faintness of
exposure and hunger racking me from head to foot? Have I stopped for
snow and ice? Have I stopped for anguish? Never; I have worked,
worked, worked, with the tears of pain rolling down my cheeks, with my
body gnawed by hunger. That night, in some way, the boxes slipped and
fell overboard as I was shifting them; just slipped out of my grasp as
if on purpose, they knowing all the time that they were my last. Home
I came, empty-handed, and found you there! I would have taken your
supplies, over on the north beach, that night, yes, without pity, had
I not felt sure of those last boxes; but I never rob needlessly. You
look at me with scorn? You are thinking of those dead men! But what
are they to Silver,--the rough common fellows,--and the wolf standing
at the castle door! Believe me, though, I try everything before I
resort to this, and only twice out of the four times have I caught
anything with my tree-hung light; once it was a vessel loaded with
provisions, and once it was a schooner with grain from Chicago, which
washed overboard and was worthless. O, the bitter day when I stood