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Newspaper Page Text
'W44J-WAPP! i?r day the banker was a ruined outcast, and the next week a suicide. The house was sold. The papers con tained strange stories of Helen's dis covery upon the island, and reporters came and pestered Tom. But no body knew anythingT)f-ihe girl. She had disappeared from the ken of all. "Still a fool, Tom?" His father asked one day, as the young man sat brooding over his nets. "I reckon so," said Tom. "You've given the best years of your youth to a worthless woman," said his father. "Now is the time to look for another." Tom did not answer. His spirit seemed broken. All the neighbors thought that He seemed to take no interest in life. Gradually they ac cepted him as one of themselves again, and forgot There is a legend along the coast that what the sea gives, it takes; what it takes it restores. The win ter of that year was one of raging storms. Many a ship in distress far out at sea was sighted, but it was not till February that the lifeboat rock ets signaled a wreck upon the rocks in the bay. They launched the boat Tom, bending to the oars, saw dimly, through the blizzard the bulk of a great liner lying between the needle points. The cold cut him like a razor edge. Mechanically he bent his strength to the oar. As the boat drew near and tried to lag alongside, while the breakers pounded her, a desperate cry of a multitude fell on their ears. A mighty wave had swept the decks of half their huddled humanity. The waves were black with bobbing heads, hands clutched wildly for aid and found none. Tom leaped into the sea to where a woman's head appeared for a mo ment in the suck of a giant wave. He seized her by the hair and hauled her to the boat's edge. Somehow they got her in. Laden to iier gunwales with all that they had been able to rescue, the lifeboat made her difficult way to ward the shore. But when she reached it at last and the men and fisherwives who had assembled there looked into Tom's face they knew who the well-dressed strange woman was. Tom kneeled beside her, chafing her cold hands. A tress of her hair hung like a wet wisp over him. Her eyes were closed, but a faint pulse stirred in her. "She will live," said the doctor that night. "But her brain is injured. How far, I don't know. It is impossible to say until she wakes." "Still a fool, Tom?" inquired his father, watching his face. "No, sir," said Tom. "I know her for what she is; nothing can wipe that out." "She's asking for you," said the doctor. Tom went into the room where she lay. Her eyes were open; as Tom drew near she stretched out her hands and found his neck and held him close. "I am glad it is so near our wed ding day," she whispered. "We must never leave each other, dearest I shall always be true to you." The last four years were wiped from her mind forever by the shock. And, as he lo iked into her eyes, Tom sawtha't this was the real Helen come back to him forever. Lobsters and shaw are becoming increasingly scarce. The decrease of the former has aroused such uneasi ness that a conference of fishery ex ports was held recently at Wooa's Hole, Mass., to devise means for counteracting it The supply of shad is becoming rapidly depleted because the fish do not get adequate protec tion on their way to the sea from the spawning grounds. The most seri ous conditions are in the Chesapeake basin, where last year's shad fishing yielded the poorest result ever recorded, . 'J,,-.4-jr ' ."-fl.