--By Indra Sharma 　　 In 1945, a 12-year-old boy saw something in a shop window that se t his heart racing. But the price -- five dollars -- was far beyond Reuben Earles means. Five dollars would buy almost a weeks groceries for his family.　　 Reuben couldnt ask his father for the money. Everything Mark Earle made through fishing in Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, Canada. Reubens mother, Dora, stretched like elastic to feed clothe their five children.　　 Nevertheless, he opened the shops weathered door and went inside. Standing prou d and straight in his floursack shirt and washed-out trousers, he told the shop keeper what he wanted, adding, “but I dont have the money right now. Can you p lease hold it for me for some time?”　　 “Ill try,” the shopkeeper smiled. “Folks around here dont usually have that kind of money to spend on things. It should keep for a while.”　　 Reuben respectfully touched his worn cap and walked out into the sunlight with t he bay rippling in a freshening wind. There was purpose in his loping stride. He would raise the five dollars and not tell anybody.　　 Hearning the sound of hammering from a side street, Reuben had an idea.　　 He ran towards the sound and stopped at a construction site. People built their own homes in Bay Roberts, using nails purchased in hessian sacks from a local fa ctory. Sometimes the sacks were discarded in the flurry of building, and Reuben knew he could sell them back to the factory for five cents a piece.　　 That day he found two sacks which he took to the rambling wooden factory and sol d to the man in charge of packing nails.　　 The boys hand tightly clutched the five-cent pieces as he ran the two kilometr es home.　　 Near his house stood the ancient barn that housed the familys goats and chicken s. Reuben found a rusty bakingsoda tin and dropped his coins inside. Then he c limbed into the loft of the bam and hid the tin beneath a pile of sweetsmellin g hay.　　 It was dinner time when Reuben got home. His father sat at the big kitchen table , working on a fishing net. Dora was at the kitchen stove, ready to serve dinner as Reuben took his place at the table.　　 He looked at his mother and smiled. Sunlight from the window gilded her shoulder-length blonde hair. Slim and beautiful, she was the centre of the home, the gl ue that held it together.　　 Her chores were never-ending. Sewing clothes for her family on the old Singer t readle machine, cooking meals and baking bread, planting and tending a vegetable garden, milking the goats and scrubbing soiled clothes on a washboard. But she was happy. Her family and their wellbeing were her highest priority.　　 Every day after chores and school, Reuben scoured the town, collecting the hessi an nail bags. On the day the two-room school closed for the summer, no student was more delighted than Reuben. Now he would have more time for his mission.　　 All summer long, despite chores at home-weeding and watering the garden, cuttin g wood and fetching water -- Reuben kept to his secret task.