The captain seated himself, and glanced somewhat apprehensively about him. The window was shuttered, and the tools with which the man worked had been piled neatly together on a little table with a raised edge which stood against the wall. Boots in every stage of formation and repair lay all bout the place--some mere gaping upper parts, and others having but the faint suggestion of what they might ultimately become in roughly cut leather sheets. The captain drew his coat-tails about his knees and rested his hands on them, and waited for the other to speak. The shoemaker waited for some moments, and then began in a low voice, with his eyes bent on the ground: "I wasn't born in these parts--it doesn't matter where I came from; some might call me a rough and common man, working at a dirty trade. Yet time was when I read and talked and held my own with men who'd been to school and college. Many and many a night I've laid awake reading and thinking and working--trying, as men say, to better myself. And what has it all brought me?" He threw out his arms with a passionate gesture and without raising his head, and let them fall at his sides again. The captain was silent, wondering what was coming, seeing in the man's attitude and in his voice some long, pent-up story, and wondering, in his simple fashion, why the man should have chosen him to hear the tale. "My life was not all work and book-learning. I married. Looking at me now, any man might say I am a hard and bitter creature; but I was the happiest in the world then. We had a child--a baby girl--the fairest, sweetest thing that ever came straight out of God's arms." He sprang up with a cry and waved his arms fiercely above his head. "Straight out of God's arms!" he cried, in a loud voice. "Let any man deny that she has gone straight back into them!" "She is dead, then?" said the captain softly. The man dropped his arms and stared about him for a moment helplessly. "Yes, but that happened long after. I can remember her now, as a tiny child, coming into the room where I worked and climbing on the bench beside me, and prattling to me in her baby fashion--music sweeter than any other that a man hears. I wish"--he had begun to roam restlessly up and down the place, swinging his arms as he went--"I wish it might have been possible for her to remain like that forever. But, of course, that wasn't to be. She grew up, and I was proud of her and proud to think that she belonged to me and held me dearer than any one else. Then into our paradise came the man--as the man always comes. I think he must have loved her--at first, at least; she was so good and beautiful and pure that no man could pass her by and look into her eyes without loving her. And then--oh, ages ago; I've forgotten when it was--she went away, and wrote me a letter saying that she had gone with him and that she would never forget me, and that some day she would come back with him, and that we were all to be happy together."