Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vessel had gone ashore at a more favorable point, and who related to him the circumstances of the wreck of the Conductor.

Struck by the account, Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to the shanty of Abigail Becker.

He found her with her six children, all thinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold.

She stood there six feet or more of substantial womanhood,--not in her stockings, for she had none,--a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, with great, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as if one saw in it her hard and weary life-experience.

She might have passed for any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honor who tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag.