"I hope we shall never be parted while I live," she said, as the tears came again. "I have no children, and no one to live for but my sister. I am so wonted to Christmas Cove, I could not feel at home anywhere else. If Uncle Jud will consent, I will adopt you legally, and when I am laid away, all I have shall be yours." And so Chip McGuire, waif of the wilderness, child of an outlaw, once sold to a human brute, yet fighting her way upward and onward to a better life, despite every drawback, now found a home and mother. No light of education had illumined her pathway, no Christian teaching and no home example, only the inborn and God-given impulse of purity, self-respect, and gratitude; and yet, like a bud forcing its way up out of a muck heap and into the sunshine, so Chip had emerged to win respect and love. But all her history is not told yet. She still lacked even a common education. There was still an old man seeking to find her, who was yet wandering afar. A homeless, almost friendless old man was he, whose life had gone amiss, and whose sole ambition was to do for her and find content in her happiness. A wanderer and recluse for many years, he was still more so now, and out of place as well among the busy haunts of men. More than that, he was an object of curiosity to all grown people and the jest of the young, as he tramped up and down the land in search of Chip. And what a pitiful quest it was,--this asking the same question thousands of times, this lingering in towns to watch mill operatives file out, this peering into stores and marts, to go on again, and repeat it for months and months. There was still another link in this chain,--a boy, so far as experience goes, who was only deterred from unwise haste by a cool-headed man. "You had better not go to Chip now," Martin said to him on his return from Peaceful Valley. "She is an odd child of nature, and you won't lose by waiting. My advice to you is to forget her for the present, find some profitable occupation, and then, when you have made a little advancement in life, go and woo her if you can. To try it now is foolish." It was cold comfort for Ray. One of Chip's first acts of emancipation was to write to Aunt Comfort and Angie, assuring both of her love and best wishes, and thanking them for all they had done. Both letters were cramped in chirography but correct in spelling, and in Angie's was a note for Martin, asking that he draw one hundred dollars of her money and send it to her, and as much more to pay some one to follow Old Cy. The latter request Martin ignored, however, for he had already set the machinery of newspaperdom at work, and an advertisement for information of that wanderer was flying far and wide.