"Pigs' feet, as I'm alive, and hot cabbage, and the coffee
a-b'ilin' too!" she said, turning to the boy and pulling out a tin
flask with a screw top, the whole embedded in the smoking cabbage.
"There, we'll be after puttin' it where Stumpy can't be rubbin'
his nose in it"--setting the pail, as she spoke, on a rough
anchor-stone.

Here the goat moved up, rubbing his head in the boy's face, and
then reaching around for the pail.

"Look at him, Patsy! Git out, ye imp, or I'll hurt ye! Leave
that kiver alone!" She laughed as she struck at the goat with her
empty gauntlet, and shrank back out of the way of his horns.

There was no embarrassment over her informal dinner, eaten as she
sat squat in a fence-corner, an anchor-stone for a table, and a
pile of spars for a chair. She talked to Babcock in an unabashed,
self-possessed way, pouring out the smoking coffee in the flask
cup, chewing away on the pigs' feet, and throwing the bones to the
goat, who sniffed them contemptuously. "Yes, he's the youngest of
our children, sir. He and Jennie--that's home, and 'most as tall
as meself--are all that's left. The other two went to heaven when
they was little ones."

"Can't the little fellow's leg be straightened?" asked Babcock, in
a tone which plainly showed his sympathy for the boy's suffering.

"No, not now; so Dr. Mason says. There was a time when it might
have been, but I couldn't take him. I had him over to Quarantine