You must not think that Silver is totally
ignorant; Shadow had the education of her day, poor thing, for ours
was a good old family as old families go in this new country of ours,
where three generations of well-to-do people constitute aristocracy.
But religion, so called, I have not taught her. Is she any the worse
for its want?
'I will teach her,' said Waring, passing over the question (which was
a puzzling one), for the new idea, the strange interest he felt in the
task before him, the fair pure mind where his hand, and his alone,
would be the first to write the story of good and evil.
'That I should become attached to the child was natural,' continued
old Fog; 'but God gave it to me to love her with so great a love that
my days have flown; for her to sail out over the stormy water, for her
to hunt through the icy woods, for her to dare a thousand deaths, to
labor, to save, to suffer,--these have been my pleasures through all
the years. When I came home, there she was to meet me, her sweet voice
calling me father, the only father she could ever know. When my poor
old sister died, I took her away in my boat by night and buried her in
deep water; and so I did with the boy we had here for a year or two,
saved from a wreck.
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