That was the way that my Tess came to me: and I know now how good my father and my mother were in letting me keep her for my[182] own—they with only what my father could make by his fishing to live on, and the wolf never very far away from the door. But the look of those black eyes of hers and the smile in them won my mother's love to her, just as it had won mine; and my mother told me, too, long years afterward, that her heart was hungry for the girl baby that God had not given her—and she said that Tess seemed to be her very own baby from the minute that she took her close to her breast from my tired little arms.  
As to where Tess came from—from what port in all the wide world the ship sailed that brought her to us—we had no way of knowing. Nothing but Tess in her bundle came ashore from the wreck; and what was left of the ship burrowed down into the sands so fast and so far that there was to be seen of her only a broken bit of her stern-post at the storm's ending. Even after the set of the currents against her sunken hull, on the next spring tide, had cut through the Barnard Bank and so made the Wreck Gat, no part of her but her broken stern-post ever showed. Tess herself, though, told us what her own name was, and so gave us a notion as to what land she belonged to; but we should have[183] been none the wiser for her telling it—she talking in words that were the same as Greek to us—if the Vicar had not lent us a hand.
 
My finding the baby made a stir in the whole village, and everybody had to have a look at her. In the afternoon along came the Vicar too—smiling through his gold spectacles, as he always did, and swinging his black cane. By that time, having had all the milk she could hold, and a good nap, and more milk again, Tess was as bright as a new sixpence: just as though she had not passed that morning nearer to death than ever she was like to pass again and live. She was lying snug in my mother's arms before the fire, and in her own fashion was talking away at a great rate—and my mother's heart quite breaking because her pretty chatter was all in heathen words that nobody could get at the meaning of. But the Vicar, being very learned, understood her in a minute. "Why, it's Spanish," said he. "It's Spanish as............