ridiculed, far from it. Well, every day showed my new friend in an
improved light. Who was it took all the children, not only his own
but actually the entire troop on board up to the bow and down to the
stern in a laughing crowd to see this or that or the other? Now a
shoal of porpoises, now a distant sail or an iceberg, now the
beautiful phosphorescence or the red light of a passing ship--the
Bishop. Who divined the innate cliquism of life on board ship and
cunningly got together in intercourse the very people who wanted to
know each other, and even brought into good temper those unfortunate
souls who thought only of their own dignity and station in life? The
Bishop. Who organized the Grand Concert and Readings in the saloon,
writing the programmes himself, pinning them on the doors,
discovering the clever and encouraging the timid and reading from
the "Cricket on the Hearth," and the "Wreck of the Grosvenor," as I
had never imagined a divine could read? The Bishop again. Who might
be seen in the mid-day hours when the cabin passengers were asleep,
quietly and without ostentation reading or talking to the steerage,
ay, and Mrs. Saskabosquia too with her baby on her arm, going about
amongst those poor tired folk, many of them with their own babies,
not too well fed and not too well washed nor clothed? Still the
Bishop, always the Bishop. They appeared as if they could not rest
without helping on somebody or something, and yet there was in
Mrs. Saskabasquia at least, a delightful sense of calm which
affected all who came near her. I used often to sit down by her, she
with the inevitable baby on her lap and two or three of the others
at her feet on rugs, and she would talk most frankly and
unaffectedly of their strange life in Canada. I learnt that she was
the daughter of a clergyman in Essex, and had, of course, been
brought up in a refined and charming country home like an English
gentlewoman. What she had had to do in the new world seemed like a