The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 199: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

192 The Little Giri, Now a Woman. | marked an old settler also, for on the frontier one desires first only to live; after a living is secured, and not till then, does the go-ahead Western man attempt to make his house homelike. I liked this place from the first. Afterward I loved it for the sake of “the little girl, now a woman,” who lived there. Soon after moving to Winfield, father was taken ill, and for a week I watched by his bedside every night. Then one evening, in order to get some much needed rest, I laid down for a couple of hours, and had just dropped into a light sleep when mother came and asked me to get up again and give directions to a man who had come to nurse father. “He is so deaf that I cannot make him hear, and so near-sighted that he cannot see anything. See if you can make him understand what is needed,” she said. So I got up and went into father’s room, and there, for the first time, saw Tom Mell, about as queer a specimen of humanity as I ever met. He was sitting in a low chair, rocking to and fro in an absent-minded sort of way, like one entirely cut off from the world. His forehead was flat and low, and his eyes had the peculiar squint common to near-sighted people. His nose looked as if it had a small bone in the end, and that the skin was drawn from it to the forehead, with a slight depression in the middle. J afterward learned that it was solid, but the thin, almost transparent cuticle never let me fully realize the fact. His hair was neatly oiled Eomichooks.co