The Argosy — page 240: what you’re looking at

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

A Story of the Sea-shore. 2.23 been, or where he came from, Transea did not get to leatu; he might have dropped from the moon. His name was Moncton; and that was all they knew. Simple and not curious, the matter was welcome to rest for them. ‘They rather liked the silently civil and generous man who had come to make his home among them, and they loved the little golden-haired Serena, who had the manners and the speech of a little lady. They knew no more of him now, eleven years later, than they had known then; and they had ceased to remember that he was not one of themselves; while Serena had grown up among them, and she and her beauty were something to be proud of. Eleven or twelve years before; Hugh Moncton had been a prosperous merchant in one of the largest towns of Scotland. A commercial crash came, and his house went, with many other houses. That might not have been much; he must have borne the reverse of fortune, as others had to bear it; but, unfortunately, something not quite straightforward in recent dealings oozed out, and his bank- ruptcy was called a fraudulent one. That, even, he might have surmounted in time; but a worse blow was to fall. His wife, a heartless, frivolous, fashionable woman, deserted him. She would not stay to share poverty and disgrace, not she, and one morning she was missing; she had run away, azd not alone! The blow, coming close upon the other blows, pretty nearly killed Hugh Moncton: he became a wanderer on the face of the earth—saw the remote, insignificant fishing village of Transea, went back to fetch his dear little prattler, Serena, and her nurse, and settled down in it, there to do battle with his troubles, and to hide himself and his shame. | “IT never loved you,” his wife wrote to him, in the moment of her departure: ‘‘I loved elsewhere, Hugh; but they made me marry you for your gold. Now that the gold is gone, I do not see that I am obliged to continue bound to you; and I bid you farewell. Take care of the child: I may not carry her with me. Do not sell her for this world’s goods when she is of an age to marry. Do not bring her up, as I was brought up, to think them the one only thing worth living for in life.—S. M.” It seemed to Hugh Moncton that all the fires of the lost could © not equal the dreadful pain that tore at his heartstrings and burnt itself into his brain in that one first hour. But for the helpless child, who ran about the house calling for ‘‘Mamma, mamma!” he would have run away himself—or he might have rashly taken his own life. But he did neither. He lived, as people do live, in spite of the terrible and crushing blows that fall upon their quivering hearts. He sold what personal trifles were left to him, and turning his back upon the great, noisy, wicked city for ever, he sought out that distant, retired, dreary place by the sea, and there buried himself and his little Serena. The old nurse, “Nana,” as Serena always CONNIClOO© SS (CO) am