Whatever the cause, Jim Coupland came back eyeless from that voyage, and found his wife lately delivered of a female infant that did well, and became Lizarann. But her mother did ill, presumably, and the doctor that attended her did certainly, if the verdict of Tallack Street was warranted. She had no call to die, said Tallack Street. Perhaps its many matrons did not allow enough for the hideous shock of poor eyeless Jim's reappearance. She _did_ die, and poor Jim, the happy bridegroom of a year ago, was left a widower at eight-and-twenty, hopelessly blind, with a baby he could never see. Oh the tragedies Life's records have to show, that remain unpublished, and must do so!--all but a chance one or two, such as this one just outlined. Lizarann was named after the ship her father made his last voyage in, or almost after it. The ship was the _Anne Eliza_, and the parson got the name wrong. Jim said it wasn't any odds, that he could reckon; and Mrs. Steptoe, his sister, said, on the contrary, it ran easier, took that way. So Lizarann she became, and Lizarann she remained. And the tale how father lost his eyesight through seeing the Flying Dutchman was the ever-present Romance of her youth, and would constantly creep into her conversation, even when the subject-matter thereof was already interesting--as, for instance, when she was discussing with Bridgetticks an expected, or perhaps we should say proposed, addition to the family of Lizarann's doll, which had been fixed for the ensuing Sunday. There could be no doubt--as there is usually in the case of human parents--about the exact hour of arrival, as the Baby was ready dressed for the event her intended mother was looking forward to, in hypothetical retirement, on the house-doorstep. She and her friend were comparing notes on previous events of a like nature. "Oh, you story!" said Lizarann, but not offensively--it was only current chat. "My father _says_ I understand. He says I understand ship's victuals and port and starboard." Grasp of these involved proficiency in other departments of thought, so the implication seemed to run. But Bridget wouldn't have it so. "Ya'ar little silly!" she said, standing on the parapidge, and hanging to the riling, so as to project backwards into the little forecourt; you couldn't, speakin' accurately, call it a garden, but it had the feelin' about it, too. "Ya'ar little silly Simplicity Sairah in a track! Ship's victuals ain't nothing to understand, nor yet port and starboard! Wait till you can understand fly-wheels and substraction engines! _They'll_ make you sit up and talk!" This little girl's father was an engineer in charge of a steam-roller. Bridget would have said the exact reverse if the two excursions into the relative fields of knowledge had been exchanged between them. Lizarann respected her friend too much to conceive of her as a time-server, and her mind cast about to fortify her position on other lines.