CHAPTER V.
HOW NANCE SHONE THROUGH HER MODEST VEILING As soon as the old captain's time was up, Gard took up his work in the mines with energetic hopefulness.
His hopefulness was unbounded.

His energy he tempered with all the tact and discretion his knowledge of men, and his experience in handling them, had taught him.
His father had been lost at sea the year after his son was born.

His mother, a good and God-fearing woman, had strained every nerve to give her boy an education.

She died when Stephen was fourteen.

He took to his father's calling and had followed it with a certain success for ten years, by which time he had attained the position of first mate.
Then the owner of the Botallack Mine, in Cornwall, having come across him in the way of business, and been struck by his intelligence and aptitude, induced him by a lucrative appointment to try his luck on land.
The managers of the Sark Mines, seeking a special man for somewhat special circumstances, had applied to Botallack for assistance, and Stephen Gard came to Sark as the representative of many hopes which, so far, had been somewhat lacking in results.
But, as old Tom Hamon had predicted, he very soon found that he had laid his hand to no easy plough.
The Sark men were characteristically difficult, and made the difficulty greater by not understanding him--or declining to understand, which came to the same thing--when he laid down his ideas and endeavoured to bring them to his ways.
Some, without doubt, had no English, and their patois was quite beyond him.