THE MASTER

A Novel

BY
I. ZANGWILL
AUTHOR OF “THE KING OF SCHNORRERS” “CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE MASTER

PROEM

Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, ’twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.

At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew, lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats; listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church procession passed through the drowsy streets. They had escaped the Great Expulsion, nor had joined in the exodus of “Evangeline,” and, sprinkled about the country, were compatriots of theirs who had drifted back when the times grew more sedate; but for the most part it was the Saxon that profited by the labors of the pioneer Gaul, repairing the tumble-down farms and the dilapidated dykes, possessing himself of embanked marsh lands, and replanting the plum-trees and the quinces his predecessor had naturalized. For the revolt of the States against Britain sent thousands of American loyalists flocking into this “New Scotland,” which thus became a colony of “New England.” Scots themselves flowed in from auld Scotland, and the German came to sink himself in the Briton, and a band of Irish adventurers, under the swashbuckling Colonel McNutt, arrived with a grant of a million acres that they were not destined to occupy. The Acadian repose had fled forever. The sparse Indian hastened to make himself scarcer, conscious there was no place for him in the new order, and disappearing deliciously in hogsheads of rum. The virgin greenwood rang with axes, startling the bear and the moose. Crash! Down went pine and beech, hemlock and maple, their stumps alone left to rot and enrich the fields. Crash!—thud! The weasel grew warier, the astonished musquash vanished in eddying circles. Bridges began to span the rivers where the beaver built its dams in happy unconsciousness of the tall cylinder that was about to crown civilization. The caribou and the silver fox pressed inland to save their skins. The snare was set in the wild-wood, and the crack of the musket followed the ring of the axe. The mackerel and the herring sought destruction in shoals, and the seines brimmed over with salmon and alewives and gaspereux. The wild land that had bloomed with golden-rod and violets was tamed with crops, and plump sheep and fat oxen pastured where the wild strawberry vine had trailed or the bull-frog had croaked under the alders. A sturdy, ingenious race the fathers of the new settlement, loving work almost as much as they feared God; turning their hand to anything, and opening it wide to the stranger. They raised their own houses, and fashioned their own tools, and shod their own horses, and later built their own vessels, and even sailed them to the great markets laden with the produce of their own fields and the timber from their own saw-mills. There were women in this workaday paradise—shapely, gentle creatures, whose hands alone were rough with field and house-work; women who span and sang when the winter night-winds whistled round the settlement. The dramas of love and grief began to play themselves out where the raccoon and the chickadee had fleeted the golden hours in careless living. Children came to make the rafters habitable, and Death to sanctify them with memories. The air grew human with the smoke of hearths, the forest with legends and histories. And as houses grew into homes and villages into townships, Church and State arose where only Faith and Freedom had been.

The sons and heirs of the fathers did not always cling to the tradition of piety and perseverance. The “Bluenose” grew apathetic, content with the fatness of the day; or, if he exerted himself, it was too often to best a neighbor. The great magnets of New York and Boston drew off or drew back all that was iron in the race.

And amid these homely emotions of yeomen, amid the crude pieties or impieties of homespun souls, amid this sane hearty intercourse with realities or this torpor of sluggish spirits, was born ever and anon a gleam of fantasy, of imagination: bizarre, transfiguring, touching things with the glamour of dream. Blind instincts—blinder still in their loneliness—yearned towards light; beautiful emotions stirred in dumb souls, emotions that mayhap turned to morbid passion in the silence and solitude of the woods, where character may grow crabbed and gnarled, as well as sound and straight. For whereas to most of these human creatures, begirt by the glory of sea and forest, the miracles of sunrise and sunset were only the familiar indications of a celestial timepiece, and the starry heaven was but a leaky ceiling in their earthly habitation, there was here and there an eye keen to note the play of light and shade and color, the glint of wave and the sparkle of hoar-frost and the spume of tossing seas; the gracious fairness of cloud and bird and blossom, the magic of sunlit sails in the offing, the witchery of white winters, and all the changing wonder of the woods; a soul with scanty self-consciousness at best, yet haply absorbing Nature, to give it back one day as Art.

Ah, but to see the world with other eyes than one’s fellows, yet express the vision of one’s race, its subconscious sense of beauty, is not all a covetable dower.

The islands of Acadia are riddled with pits, where men have burrowed for Captain Kidd’s Treasure and found nothing but holes. The deeper they delved the deeper holes they found. Whoso with blood and tears would dig Art out of his soul may lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness, or, striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when his eye is purged of the spell of morning, he sees his hand is full of withered leaves.

Book I—CHAPTER I
SOLITUDE

“Matt, Matt, what’s thet thar noise?”

Matt opened his eyes vaguely, shaking off his younger brother’s frantic clutch.

“It’s on’y the frost,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. “Go to sleep, Billy.”

Since the sled accident that had crippled him for life, Billy was full of nervous terrors, and the night had been charged with mysterious noises. Within the lonely wooden house weather-boards and beams cracked; without, twigs snapped and branches crashed; at times Billy heard reports as loud as pistol-shots. One of these shots meant the bursting of the wash-basin on the bedroom bench, Matt having forgotten to empty its contents, which had expanded into ice.

Matt curled himself up more comfortably and almost covered his face with the blanket, for the cold in the stoveless attic was acute. In the gray half-light the rough beams and the quilts glistened with frozen breaths. The little square window-panes were thickly frosted, and below the crumbling rime was a thin layer of ice left from the day before, solid up to the sashes, and leaving no infinitesimal dot of clear glass, for there was nothing to thaw it except such heat as might radiate through the bricks of the square chimney that came all the way from the cellar through the centre of the flooring to pop its head through the shingled roof.

“Matt!” Billy was nudging his brother in the ribs again.

“Hullo!” grumbled the boy.

“Thet thar ain’t the frost. Hark!”

“ ‘Tis, I tell ye. Don’t you hear the pop, pop, pop?”

“Not thet; t’other down-stairs.”

“Oh, thet’s the wind, I reckon.”

“No; it’s some ’un screamin’!”

Matt raised himself on his elbow, and listened.

“Why, you gooney, it’s on’y mother rowin’ Harriet,” he said, reassuringly, and snuggled up again between the blankets.

The winter, though yet young, had already achieved a reputation. Blustrous north winds had driven inland, felling the trees like lumbermen. In the Annapolis Basin myriads of herrings, surprised by Jack Frost before their migratory instinct awoke, had been found frozen in the weirs, and the great salt tides overflowing the high dykes had been congealed into a chocolate sea that, when the liquid water beneath ran back through the sluices, lay solid on the marshes. By the shores of the Basin of Minas sea-birds flapped ghostlike over amber ice-cakes, whose mud-streaks under the kiss of the sun blushed like dragon’s blood.

Snow had fallen heavily, whitening the “evergreen” hemlocks, and through the shapeless landscape half-buried oxen had toiled to clear the blurred roads bordered by snow-drifts, till the three familiar tracks of hoofs and sleigh-runners came in sight again. The stage to Truro ploughed its way along, with only dead freight on its roof and a furred animal or two, vaguely human, shivering inside. Sometimes the mail had to travel by horse, and sometimes it altogether disappointed Billy and his brothers and sisters of the excitement of its passage; for the stage road ran by the small clearing, in the centre of which their house and barn had been built—a primitive gabled house, like a Noah’s ark, ugliness unadorned, and a cheap log barn of the “lean-to” type, with its cracks corked with moss, and a roof of slabs.

Jack Frost might stop the mail, but he could not stop the gayeties of the season. “Wooden frolics” and quilting-parties and candy-pullings and infares and Baptist revival-meetings had been as frequent as ever; and part of Matt’s enjoyment of his couch was a delicious sense of oversleeping himself legitimately, for even his mother could hardly expect him to build the fire at five when he had only returned from Deacon Hailey’s “muddin’ frolic” at two. He saw himself coasting down the white slopes in his hand-sled, watching the wavering radiance of the northern lights that paled the moon and the stars, and wishing his mother would not spoil the after-glow of the night’s pleasure and the poetic silence of the woods by grumbling about his grown-up sister Harriet, who had deserted them for an earlier escort home. He felt himself well rewarded for his afternoon’s labor in loading marsh mud for the top-dressing of Deacon Hailey’s fields; and a sudden remembrance of how his mother had been rewarded for helping Mrs. Hailey to prepare the feast made him nudge Billy in his turn.

“Cheer up, Billy. We’ve brought back a basket o’ goodies: there’s plum-cake, doughnuts—”

“It’s gettin’ worst,” said Billy. “Hark!”

Matt mumbled impatiently and redirected his thoughts to the “muddin’ frolic.” The images of the night swept before him with almost the vividness of actuality; he lost himself in memories as though they were realities, and every now and then a dash of sleep streaked these waking visions with the fantasy of dream.

“My, how the fiddle shrieks!” runs the boy’s reminiscence. “Why don’t ole Jupe do his tunin’ to home, the pesky nigger? We’re all waitin’ for the reel—the ‘fours’ are all made up; Ruth Hailey and me hev took the floor. Ruth looks jest great with thet white frock an’ the pink sash, thet’s a fact. Hooray!—‘The Devil among the Tailors!’—La, lalla, lalla, lalla, lalla, flip-flop!” He hears the big winter top-boots thwack the threshing-floor. Keep it up! Whoop! Faster! Ever faster! Oh, the joy of life!

Now he is swinging Ruth in his arms. Oh, the merry-go-round! The long rows of candles pinned by forks to the barn walls are guttering in the wind of the movement; the horses tied to their mangers neigh in excitement; from between their stanchions the mild-eyed cows gaze at the dancers, perking their naïve noses and tranquilly chewing the cud. A bat, thawed out of his winter nap by the heat of the temporary stove, flutters drowsily about the candles; and the odors of the stable and of the packed hay mingle with the scents of the ball-room. Matt’s exhaustive eye, though never long off pretty Ruth’s face, takes in even the grains of wheat that gild many a tousled head of swain or lass as the shaking of the beams dislodges the unthreshed kernels in the mow under the eaves, and, keener even than the eye of his collie, Sprat, notes the mice that dart from their holes to seize the fallen drops of tallow. But perhaps Sprat is only lazy, for he will not vacate his uncomfortable snuggery under the stove, though he has to shift his carcass incessantly to escape the jets of tobacco-juice constantly squirted in his direction. It serves him right, thinks his young master, for persisting in coming, though, for the matter of that, the creature, having superintended the mud-hauling, has more right to be present than Bully Preep. “Wonder why sister Harriet lets him dance with her so of’n!” the panorama of his thought proceeds. “What kin she see in the skunk, fur lan’ sakes? I told her ’bout the way he bully-ragged me when he was boss o’ the school and I was a teeny shaver. But she don’t seem to care a snap. Girls are queer critters, thet’s a fact. He used to put a chip on my shoulder, an’ egg the fellers on to flick it off. But, gosh! didn’t I hit him a lick when he pulled little Ruth’s hair? He’d a black eye, thet’s a fact, though he giv’ me two, an’ mother an’ teacher ’ud a giv’ me one more apiece, but there warn’t no more left. I took it out in picters though, I guess. My! didn’t ole McTavit’s face jest look reedic’lous when he discovered Bully Preep in the fly-leaf of every readin’-book. Thet’s jest how mother is glarin’ at Harriet this moment. Pop! pop! pop! What a lot o’ ginger-beer an’ spruce-beer Deacon Hailey is openin’! Pop! pop! pop! He don’t seem to notice them thar black bottles o’ rum. He’s ’tarnal cute, is ole Hey. Seems like he’s talkin’ to mother. Wonder how she kin understand him. He allus talks as if his mouth was full o’ words—but it’s on’y tobacco, I reckon. Pop! pop! pop! Thet’s what I allus hear him say, windin’ up with a ‘Hey’—an’ it does rile me some to refuse pumpkin-pie, not knowin’ he’s invitin’ me to anythin’ but hay. I ’spect mother’s heerd him talk considerable, just es I’ve heerd the jays an’ the woodpeckers; though she kin’t tell one from t’other, I vow, through bein’ raised at Halifax. Thunderation! thet’s never her dancin’ with ole Hey! My stars, what’ll her elders say? Well, I wow! She is backslidin’. Ah, she recollecks! She pulls up, her face is like a beet. Ole Hey is argufyin’, but she hangs back in her traces. I reckon she kinder thinks she’s kicked over the dashboard this time. Ah, he’s gone and taken Harriet for a pardner instead; he’ll like sister better, I guess. By gum! He’s kickin’ up his heels like a colt when it fust feels the crupper. I do declare Marm Hailey is lookin’ pesky ugly ’bout it. She’s a mighty handsome critter, anyways. Pity she kin’t wear her hat with the black feather indoors—she does look jest spliffin’ when she drives her horses through the snow. Whoop! Keep it up! Sling it out, ole Jupe! More rosin. Yankee doodle, keep it up, Yankee doodle dandy! Go it, you cripples; I’ll hold your crutches! Why, there’s Billy dancin’ with the crutch I made him!” he tells himself as his vision merges in dream. “Pop! pop! pop! How his crutch thumps the floor! Poor Billy! Fancy hevin’ to hop through life on thet thar crutch, like a robin on one leg! Or shall I hev to make him a longer one when he’s growed up? Mebbe he won’t grow up—mebbe he’ll allus be the identical same size; and when he’s an ole man he’ll be the right size again, an’ the crutch’ll on’y be a sorter stick. I wish I hed a stick to make this durned cow keep quiet—I kin’t milk her! So! so! Daisy! Ole Jupe’s music ain’t for four-legged critters to dance to! My! what’s thet nonsense ’bout a cow? Why, I’m dreamin’. Whoa, there! Give her a tickler in the ribs, Billy. Hullo! look out! here’s father come back from sea! Quick, Billy, chuck your crutch in the hay-mow. Kin’t you stand straighter nor that? Unkink your leg, or father’ll never take you out to be a pirate. Fancy a pirate on a crutch! It was my fault, father, for fixin’ up thet thar fandango, but mother’s lambasted me a’ready, an’ she wanted to shoot herself. But it don’t matter to you, father—you’re allus away a’most, an’ Billy’s crutch kin’t get into your eye like it does into mother’s. She was afeared to write to you ’bout it. Thet’s on’y Billy in a fit—you see, Daisy kicked him, and they couldn’t fix his leg back proper; it don’t fit, so he hes fits now an’ then. He’ll never be a pirate now. Drive the crutch deeper into the ice, Charley; steady there with the long pole. The iron pin goes into the crutch, Billy; don’t get off the ashes, you’ll slide under the sled. Now, then, is the rope right? Jump on the sled, you girls and fellers! Round with the pole! Whoop! Hooray! Ain’t she scootin’ jest! Let her rip! Pop! Snap! Geewiglets! The rope’s give! Don’t jump off, Billy, I tell you; you’ll kill yourself! Stick in your toes an’ don’t yowl; we’ll slacken at the dykes. Look at Ruth—she don’t scream. Thunderation! We’re goin’ over into the river! Hold tight, you uns! Bang! Smash! We’re on the ice-cakes! Is thet you thet’s screamin’, Billy? You ain’t hurt, I tell you—don’t yowl—you gooney—don’t—”

But it was not Billy’s voice that he heard screaming when the films of sleep really cleared away. The little cripple was nestling close up to him with the same panic-stricken air as when they rode that flying sled together. This time it was impossible to mistake their mother’s voice for the wind—it rose clearly in hysterical vituperation.

“An’ you orter be ’shamed o’ yourself, I do declare, goin’ home all alone in a sleigh with a young man—in the dead o’ night, too!”

“There were more nor ourn on the road; and since Abner Preep was perlite enough—”

“Yes, an’ you didn’t think o’ me on the road oncet, I bet! If young Preep wanted to do the perlite, he’d’ a’ took me in his father’s sleigh, not a wholesome young gal.”

“But I was tar’d out with dancin’ e’en a’most, and you on’y—”

“Don’t you talk about my dancin’, you blabbin’ young slummix! Jest keep your eye on your Preeps with their bow-legs an’ their pigeon-toes.”

“His legs is es straight es yourn, anyhow.”

“P’raps you’ll say thet I’ve got Injun blood next. Look at his round shoulders and his lanky hair—he’s a Micmac, thet’s what he is. He on’y wants a few baskets and butter-tubs to make him look nateral. Ugh! I kin smell spruce every time I think on him.”

“It’s you that hev hed too much spruce-beer, hey?”

“You sassy minx! Folks hev no right to bring eyesores into the world. I’d rather stab you than see you livin’ with Abner Preep. It’s a squaw he wants, thet’s a fact, not a wife!”

“I’d rather stab myself than go on livin’ with you.”

For a moment or two Matt listened in silent torture. The frequency of these episodes had made him resigned, but not callous. Now Harriet’s sobs were added to the horror of the altercation, and Matt fancied he heard a sound of scuffling. He jumped out of bed in an agony of alarm. He pulled on his trousers, caught up his coat, and slipped it on as he flew barefoot down the rough wooden stairs, with his woollen braces dangling behind him.

In the narrow icy passage at the foot of the stairs, in the bleak light from the row of little crusted panes on either side of the door, he found his mother and sister, their rubber-cased shoes half-buried in snow that had drifted in under the door. Mrs. Strang was fully dressed in her “frolickin’ ” costume, which at that period included a crinoline; she wore an astrakhan sacque, reaching to the knees, and a small poke-bonnet, plentifully beribboned, blooming with artificial flowers within and without, and tied under the chin by broad, black, watered bands. Round her neck was a fringed afghan, or home-knit muffler. She was a tall, dark, voluptuously-built woman, with blazing black eyes and handsome features of a somewhat Gallic cast, for she came of old Huguenot stock. She stood now drawing on her mittens in terrible silence, her bosom heaving, her nostrils quivering. Harriet was nearer the door, flushed and panting and sobbing, a well-developed auburn blonde of sixteen, her hair dishevelled, her bodice unhooked, a strange contrast to the other’s primness.

“Where you goin’?” she said, tremulously, as she barred her mother’s way with her body.

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” answered her mother, carefully smoothing out her right mitten.

“Nonsense, mother,” broke in Matt. “You kin’t go out—it’s snowin’.”

He brushed past the pair and placed himself with his back to the door, his heart beating painfully. His mother’s mad threats were familiar enough, yet they never ceased to terrify. Some day she might really do something desperate. Who knew?

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” repeated Mrs. Strang, carefully winding the muffler round her head.

She made a step towards the door, sweeping the limp Harriet roughly behind her.

“You kin’t get out,” Matt said, firmly. “Why, you hevn’t hed breakfast yet.”

“What do I want o’ breakfus? Your sister is breakfus ’nough for me. Clear out o’ the way.”

“Don’t you let her go, Matt!” cried Harriet. “I’ll quit instead.”

“You!” exclaimed her mother, turning fiercely upon her, while her eyes spat fire. “You are young and wholesome—the world is afore you. You were not brought from a great town to be buried in a wilderness. Marry your Preeps an’ your Micmacs, and nurse your pappooses. God has cursed me with froward children an’ a cripple, an’ a husband that goes gallivantin’ onchristianly about the world with never a thought for his ’mortal soul, an’ the Lord has doomed me to worship Him in the wrong church. Mother yourselves; I throw up the position.”

“Is it my fault if father hesn’t wrote you lately?” cried Harriet. “Is it my fault if there’s no Baptist church to Cobequid village?”

“Shut your mouth, you brazen hussy! You’ve drove your mother to her death! Stand out o’ my way, Matthew; don’t you disobey my dyin’ reques’.”

“I sha’n’t,” said the boy, squaring his shoulders firmly against the door. “Where kin you drownd yourself? The pond’s froze an’ the tide’s out.”

He could think of no other argument for the moment, and he had an incongruous vision of her sliding down to the river on her stomach, as the boys often did, down the steep, reddish-brown slopes of greasy mud, or sinking into a squash-hole like an errant horse.

“Why, there’s on’y mud-flats,” he added.

“I’ll wait on the mud-flats fur the merciful tide.” She fastened her bonnet-strings firmly.

“The river is full of ice,” he urged.

“There will be room fur me,” she answered. Then, with a sudden exclamation of dismay, “My God! you’ve got no shoes and socks on! You’ll ketch your death. Go up-stairs d’reckly.”

“No,” replied Matt, becoming conscious for the first time of a cold wave creeping up his spinal marrow. “I’ll ketch my death, then,” and he sneezed vehemently.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks d’reckly, you wretched boy. You know what a bother I hed with you last time.”

He shook his head, conscious of a trump card.

“D’ye hear me! Put on your shoes and socks!”

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque,” retorted Matt, clinching his fists.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks!” repeated his mother.

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque, an’ I’ll put on my shoes an’ socks.”

They stood glaring defiance at each other, like a pair of duellists, their breaths rising in the frosty air like the smoke of pistols—these two grotesque figures in the gray light of the bleak passage, the tall, fierce brunette, in her flowery bonnet and astrakhan sacque, and the small, shivering, sneezing boy, in his patched homespun coat, with his trailing braces and bare feet. They heard Harriet’s teeth chatter in the silence.

“Go back to bed, you young varmint,” said Matt, suddenly catching sight of Billy’s white face and gray night-gown on the landing above. “You’ll ketch your death.”

There was a scurrying sound from above, a fleeting glimpse of other little night-gowned figures. Matt and his mother still confronted each other warily. And then the situation was broken up by the near approach of sleigh-bells. They stopped slowly, mingling their jangling with the creak of runners sliding over frosty snow, then the scrunch of heavy boots travelled across the clearing. Harriet flushed in modest alarm and fled up-stairs. Mrs. Strang hastily retreated into the kitchen, and for one brief moment Matt breathed freely, till, hearing the click of the door-latch, he scented gunpowder. He dashed towards the door and pressed the thumb-latch, but it was fastened from within.

“Harriet!” he gasped, “the gun! the gun!”

He beat at the door, his imagination seeing through it. His loaded gun was resting on the wooden hooks fastened to the beam in the ceiling. He heard his mother mount a chair; he tried to break open the door, but could not. The chances of getting round by the back way flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed as quickly. There was no time—in breathless agony he waited the report of the gun. Crash! A strange, unexpected sound smote his ears—he heard the thud of his mother’s body striking the floor. She had stabbed herself, then, instead. Half mad with excitement and terror, he backed to the end of the passage, took a running leap, and dashed with his mightiest momentum against the frail battened door. Off flew the catch, open flew the door with Matt in pursuit, and it was all the boy could do to avoid tumbling over his mother, who sat on the floor among the ruins of a chair, rubbing her shins, her bonnet slightly disarranged, and the gun, still loaded, demurely on its perch. What had happened was obvious; some of the little Strang mice, taking advantage of the cat’s absence at the “muddin’ frolic,” had had a frolic on their own account, turning the chair into a sled, and binding up its speedily-broken leg to deceive the maternal eye. It might have supported a sitter; under Mrs. Strang’s feet it had collapsed ere her hand could grasp the gun.

“The pesky young varmints!” she exclaimed, full of this new grievance. “They might hev crippled me fur life. Always a-tearin’ an’ a-rampagin’ an’ a-ruinatin’. I kin’t keep two sticks together. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position.”

The sound of the butt-end of a whip battering the front-door brought her to her feet with a bound. She began dusting herself hastily with her hand.

“Well, what’re you gawkin’ at?” she inquired. “Kin’t you go an’ unbar the door, ’stead o’ standin’ there like a stuck pig?”

Matt knew the symptoms of volcanic extinction; without further parley he ran to the door and took down the beechen bar. The visitor was “ole Hey,” who drove the mail. The deacon came in, powdered as from his own grist-mill, and added the snow of his top-boots to the drift in the hall. There were leather-faced mittens on his hands, ear-laps on his cap, tied under the chin, a black muffler, hoary with frost from his breath, round his neck and mouth, and an outer coat of buffalo-skin swathing his body down to his ankles, so that all that was visible of him was a little inner circle of red face with frosted eyebrows.

Mrs. Strang stood ready in the hall with a genial smile, and Matt, his heart grown lighter, returned to the kitchen, extracted the family foot-gear from under the stove, where it had been placed to thaw, and putting on his own still-sodden top-boots, he set about shaving whittlings and collecting kindlings to build the fire.

“Here we are again, hey!” cried the deacon, as heartily as his perpetual, colossal quid would permit.

“Do tell! is it really you?” replied Mrs. Strang, with her pleasant smile.

“Yes—dooty is dooty, I allus thinks,” he said, spitting into the snow-drift and flicking the snow over the tobacco-juice with his whip. “Whatever Deacon Hailey’s hand finds to do he does fust-rate—thet’s a fact. It don’t seem so long a while since you and me were shakin’ our heels in the Sir Roger. Nay, don’t look so peaked—there’s nuthin’ to make such a touse about. You air a partic’ler Baptist, hey? An’ I guess you kinder allowed Deacon Hailey would be late with the mail, hey? But he’s es spry es if he’d gone to bed with the fowls. You won’t find the beat of him among the young fellers nowadays—thet’s so. They’re a lazy, slinky lot; and es for doin’ their dooty to their country or their neighbor—”

“Hev you brought me a letter?” interrupted Mrs. Strang, anxiously.

“I guess—but you’re goin’ out airly?”

“I allowed I’d walk over to the village to see if it hed come.”

“Oh, but it ain’t the one you expec’.”

“No?” she faltered.

“I guess not. Thet’s why I brought it myself. I kinder scented it was suthin’ special, and so I reckoned I’d save you the trouble of trudgin’ to the post-office. Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to spare himself trouble to obleege a fellow-critter. Do es you’d be done by, hey?” The deacon never lost an opportunity of pointing the moral of a position. Perhaps his sermonizing tendency was due to his habit of expounding the Sunday texts at a weekly meeting, or perhaps his weekly exposition was due to his sermonizing tendency.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Strang extended her hand for the letter. He produced it slowly, apparently from up the sleeve of his top-most coat, a wet, forlorn-looking epistle, addressed in a sprawling hand. Mrs. Strang turned it about, puzzled.

“P’raps it’s from Uncle Matt,” ejaculated Matt, appearing suddenly at the kitchen door.

“You’ve got Uncle Matt on the brain,” said Mrs. Strang. “It’s a Halifax stamp.” She could not understand it; her own family rarely wrote to her, and there was no hand of theirs in the address. Deacon Hailey lingered on, apparently prepared, in his consideration for others, to listen to the contents of his “fellow-critter’s” letter.

“Ah, sonny,” he said to Matt, “only jest turned out, and not slicked up yet. When I was your age I hed done my day’s chores afore the day hed begun. No wonder the Province is so ’tarnally behindhand, hey?”

“Thet’s so,” Matt murmured. Pop! pop! pop! was all that he heard, so that ole Hey’s moral exhortations left him neither a better nor a wiser boy.

Mrs. Strang still held the letter in her hand, apparently having become indifferent to it. Ole Hey did not know she was waiting for him to go, so that she might put on her spectacles and read it. She never wore her spectacles in public, any more than she wore her nightcap. Both seemed to her to belong to the privacies of the inner life, and glasses in particular made an old woman of one before one’s time. If she had worn out her eyes with needle-work and tears, that was not her neighbors’ business.

The deacon, with no sign of impatience, elaborately unbuttoned his outer buffalo-skin, then the overcoat beneath that, and the coat under that, and then, pulling up the edge of his cardigan that fitted tightly over his waistcoats, he toilsomely thrust his horny paw into his breeches-pocket and hauled out a fig of “black-jack.” Then he slowly produced from the other pocket a small tool-chest in the guise of a pocket-knife, and proceeded to cut the tobacco with one of the instruments.

“Come here, sonny!” he cried.

“The deacon wants you,” said Mrs. Strang.

Matt moved forward into the passage, wondering. Ole Hey solemnly held up the wedge of black-jack he had cut, and when Matt’s eye was well fixed on it he dislodged the old “chaw” from his cheek with contortions of the mouth, and blew it out with portentous gravity. Lastly, he replaced it by the wedge of “black-jack,” mouthed and moulded the new quid conscientiously between tongue and teeth, and passed the ball into his right cheek.

“Thet’s the way to succeed in life, sonny. Never throw away dirty afore you got clean, hey?”

Poor Matt, unconscious of the lesson, waited inquiringly and deferentially, but the deacon was finished, and turned again to his mother.

“I ’spect it ’ll be from some of the folks to home, mebbe.”

“Mebbe,” replied Mrs. Strang, longing for solitude and spectacles.

“When did you last hear from the boss?”

“He was in the South Seas, the capt’n, sellin’ beads to the savages. He’d a done better to preach ’em the Word, I do allow.”

“Ah, you kin’t expect godliness from sailors,” said the deacon. “It’s in the sea es the devil spreads his nets, thet’s a fact.”

“The Apostles were fishermen,” Mrs. Strang reminded him.

“Yes; but fishers ain’t sailors, Mrs. Strang. It’s in furrin parts that the devil lurks, and the further a man goes from his family the nearer he goes to the devil, hey?”

Mrs. Strang winced. “But he’s gittin’ our way now,” she protested, unguardedly. “He’s comin’ South with a freight.”

“Ah, joined the blockade-runners, hey?”

Mrs. Strang bit her lip and flushed. “I don’t kear,” the deacon said, reassuringly. “I don’t see why Nova Scotia should go solid for the North. What’s the North done for Nova Scotia ’cept ruin us with their protection dooties, gol durn ’em. They won’t have slaves, hey? Ain’t we their slaves? Don’t they skin us es clean es a bear does a sheep? Ain’t they allus on the lookout to snap up the Province? But I never talk politics. If the North and South want to cut each other’s throats, that’s not our consarn. Mind your own business, I allus thinks, hey? And if your boss kin make a good spec by provisionin’ the Southerners, you’ll be a plaguy sight better off, I vow. And so will I—for, you know, I shall hev to call in the mortgage unless you fork out thet thar interest purty slick. There’s no underhandedness about Deacon Hailey. He gives you fair warnin’.”

“D’rectly the letter comes you shall have it—I’ve often told you so.”

“Mebbe thet’ll be his letter, after all—put his thumb out, I guess, and borrowed another feller’s, hey?”

“No—he’d be nowhere near Halifax,” said Mrs. Strang, her feverish curiosity mounting momently. “Don’t them thar sleigh-bells play a tune! I guess your horses air gettin’ kinder restless.”

“Well—there’s nuthin’ I kin do for you to Cobequid Village?” he said, lingeringly.

Mrs. Strang shook her head. “Thank you, I guess not.”

“You wouldn’t kear to write an answer now—I’d be tolerable pleased to post it for you down thar. Allus study your fellow-critters, I allus thinks.”

“No, thank you.”

Deacon Hailey spat deliberately on the floor.

“Er—you got to home safe this mornin’?”

“Yes, thank you. We all come together, me and Harriet and Matt. ’Twere a lovely walk in the moonlight, with the Aurora Borealis a-quiverin’ and a-flushin’ on the northern horizon.”

“A-h-h,” said the deacon slowly, and rather puzzled. “A roarer! Hey?”

At this moment a sudden stampede of hoofs and a mad jangling of bells were heard without. With a “Durn them beasts!” the deacon breathlessly turned tail and fled in pursuit of the mail-sleigh, mounting it over the luggage-rack. When he had turned the corner, Matt’s grinning face emerged from behind the snow-capped stump of a juniper.

“I reckon I fetched him thet time,” he said, throwing away the remaining snowball, as he hastened gleefully inside to partake of the contents of the letter.

He found his mother sitting on the old settle in the kitchen, her spectacled face gray as the sand on the floor, her head bowed on her bosom. One limp hand held the crumpled letter. She reminded him of a drooping foxglove. The room had a heart of fire now, the stove in the centre glowed rosily with rock-maple brands, but somehow it struck a colder chill to Matt’s blood than before.

“Father’s drownded,” his mother breathed.

“He’ll never know ’bout Billy now,” he thought, with a gleam of relief.

Mrs. Strang began to wring her mittened hands silently, and the letter fluttered from between her fingers. Matt made a dart at it, and read as follows:

Dear Marm,—Don’t take on but ime sorrie to tell you that the Cap is a gone goose we run the block kade oust slick but the 2 time we was took by them allfird Yanks we reckkend to bluff ’em in the fog but about six bells a skwad of friggets bore down on us sudden like ole nick the cap he sees he was hemd in on a lee shoar and he swears them lubberly northers shan’t have his ship not if he goes to Davy Jones his loker he lufs her sharp up into the wind and sings out lower the longbote boys and while the shot was tearin and crashin through the riggin he springs to the hall-yards and hauls down the cullers then jumps through the lazzaret into the store room kicks the head of a carsk of ile in clinches a bit of oakem dips it in the ile and touches a match to it and drops it on the deck into the runin ile and then runs for it hisself jumps into the bote safe with the cullers and we sheer off into the fog mufflin our oars with our caps and afore that tarnation flame bust out to show where we were we warnt there but we heard the everlastin fools poundin away at the poor old innocent Sally Bell till your poor boss dear marm he larfs and ses he shipmets ses he look at good old Sally she’s stickin out her yellow tongue at em and grinnin at the dam goonies beg pardon marm but that was his way he never larfed no more for wed disremembered the cumpess and drifted outer the fog into a skwall and the night was comin on and we drov blind on a reef and capsized but we all struck out for shore and allowed the cap was setting sale the same way as the rest on us but when we reached the harbor the cap he warnt at the helm and a shipmet ses ses he as how he would swim with that air bundle of cullers that was still under his arm and they tangelled round his legs and sorter dragged him under and kep him down like sea-weed and now dear marm he lays in the Gulf of Mexiker kinder rapped in a shroud and gone aloft I was the fust mate and a better officer I never wish to sine with for tho he did sware till all was blue his hart was like an unborn babbys and wishing you a merry Christmas and God keep you and the young orfuns and giv you a happy new year dear marm you deserve it.

ime yours to command,

Hoska Cuddy (Mate).

p s.—i would have writ erlier, but i couldn’t get your address till i worked my way to Halifax and saw the owners scuse me not puttin this in a black onwellop i calclated to brake it eesy.

Matt hastily took in the gist of the letter, then stood folding it carefully, at a loss what to say to the image of grief rocking on the settle. From the barn behind came the lowing of Daisy—half protestation, half astonishment at the unpunctuality of her breakfast. Matt found a momentary relief in pitying the cow. Then his mother’s voice burst out afresh.

“My poor Davie,” she moaned. “Cut off afore you could repent, too deep down fur me to kiss your dead lips. I hevn’t even got a likeness o’ you; you never would be took. I shall never see your face again on airth, and I misdoubt if I’ll meet you in heaven.”

“Of course you will—he saved his flag,” said Matt, with shining eyes.

His mother shook her head, and set the roses on her bonnet nodding gayly to the leaping flame. “Your father was born a Sandemanian,” she sighed.

“What is thet?” said Matt.

“Don’t ask me; there air things boys mustn’t know. And you’ve seen in the letter ’bout his profane langwidge. I never would’ve run off with him; all my folks were agen it, and a sore time I’ve hed in the wilderness ’way back from my beautiful city. But it was God’s finger. I pricked the Bible fur a verse, an’ it came: ‘An’ they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel.’ ”

She nodded and muttered, “An’ I was his angel,” and the roses trembled in the firelight. “If you were a good boy, Matt,” she broke off, “you’d know where thet thar varse come from.”

“Hedn’t I better tell Harriet?” he asked.

“Acts, chapter eleven, verse fifteen,” muttered his mother. “It was the finger of God. What’s thet you say ’bout Harriet? Ain’t she finished tittivatin’ herself yet—with her father layin’ dead, too?” She got up and walked to the foot of the stairs. “Harriet!” she shrieked.

Harriet dashed down the stairs, neat and pretty.

“You onchristian darter!” cried Mrs. Strang, revolted by her sprightliness. “Don’t you know father’s drownded?”

Harriet fell half-fainting against the banister. Mrs. Strang caught her and pulled her towards the kitchen.

“There, there,” she said, “don’t freeze out here, my poor child. The Lord’s will be done.”

Harriet mutely dropped into the chair her mother drew for her before the stove. Daisy’s bellowing became more insistent.

“An’ he never lived to take me back to Halifax, arter all!” moaned Mrs. Strang.

“Never mind, mother,” said Harriet, gently. “God will send you back some day. You hev suffered enough.”

Mrs. Strang burst into tears for the first time. “Ah, you don’t know what my life hes been!” she cried, in a passion of self-pity.

Harriet took her mother’s mittened hand tenderly in hers. “Yes we do, mother—yes we do. We know how you hev slaved and struggled.”

As she spoke a panorama of the slow years was fleeting through the minds of all three—the long blank weeks uncolored by a letter, the fight with poverty, the outbursts of temper; all the long-drawn pathos of lonely lives. Tears gathered in the children’s eyes—more for themselves than for their dead father, who for the moment seemed but gone on a longer voyage.

“Harriet,” said Mrs. Strang, choking back her sobs, “bring down my poor little orphans, and wrap them up well. We’ll say a prayer.”

Harriet gathered herself together and went weeping up the stairs. Matt followed her with a sudden thought. He ran up to his room and returned, carrying a square sheet of rough paper.

His mother had sunk into Harriet’s chair. He lifted up her head and showed her the paper.

“Davie!” she shrieked, and showered passionate kisses on the crudely-colored sketch of a sailor—a figure that had a strange touch of vitality, a vivid suggestion of brine and breeze. She arrested herself suddenly. “You pesky varmint!” she cried. “So this is what become o’ the fly-leaf of the big Bible!”

Matt hung his head. “It was empty,” he murmured.

“Yes, but there’s another page thet ain’t—thet tells you to obey your parents. This is how you waste your time ’stead o’ wood-choppin’.”

“Uncle Matt earns his livin’ at it,” he urged.

“Uncle Matt’s a villain. Don’t you go by your Uncle Matt, fur lan’s sake.” She rolled up the drawing fiercely, and Matt placed himself apprehensively between it and the stove.

“You said he wouldn’t be took,” he remonstrated.

Mrs. Strang sullenly placed the paper in her bosom, and the action reminded her to remove her bonnet and sacque. Harriet, drooping and listless, descended the stairs, carrying the two-year-old and marshalling the other little ones—a blinking, bewildered group of cherubs, with tousled hair and tumbled clothes. Sprat came down last, stretching himself sleepily. He had kept the same late hours as Matt, and, returning with him from the “muddin’ frolic,” had crept under his bed.

The sight of the children moved Mrs. Strang to fresh weeping. She almost tore the baby from Harriet’s arms.

“He never saw you!” she cried, hysterically, closing the wee yawning mouth with kisses. Her eyes fell on Billy limping towards the red-hot stove where the others were already clustered.

“An’ he never saw you,” she cried to him, as she adjusted the awed infant on the settle. “Or it would hev broke his heart. Kneel down and say a prayer for him, you mischeevious little imp.”

Billy, thus suddenly apostrophized, paled with nervous fright. His big gray eyes grew moist, a lump rose in his throat. But he knelt down with the rest and began bravely:

“Our Father, which art in heaven—”

“Well, what are you stoppin’ about?” jerked his mother, for the boy had paused suddenly with a strange light in his eyes.

“I never knowed what it meant afore,” he said, simply.

His mother’s eye caught the mystic gleam from his.

“A sign! a sign!” she cried, ecstatically, as she sprang up and clasped the little cripple passionately to her heaving bosom.

CHAPTER II
THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE

The death of his father—of whom he had seen so little—gave Matt a haunting sense of the unsubstantiality of things. What! that strong, wiry man, with the shrewd, weather-beaten face and the great tanned hands and tattooed arms, was only a log swirling in the currents of unknown waters! In vain he strove to figure him as a nebulous spirit—the conception would not stay. Nay, the incongruity seemed to him to touch blasphemy. His father belonged to the earth and the seas; had no kinship with clouds. How well he remembered the day, nearly three years ago, when they had parted forever, and, indeed, it had been sufficiently stamped upon his memory without this final blow.

It is a day of burning August—so torrid that they have left their coats on the beach. They are out on the sand flats, wading for salmon among the giant saucers of salt water, the miniature lakes left by the tide, for this is one of the rare spots in the Province where the fish may be taken thus. What fun it is spearing them in a joyous rivalry that makes the fishers wellnigh jab each other’s toes with their pitchforks, and completely tear each other’s shirt-sleeves away in the friendly tussle for a darting monster, so that the heat blisters their arms with great white blobs that stand out against the brown of the boy’s skin and the ornamental coloring of the man’s. Now and then in their early course, when tiny threads of water spurt from holes in the sand, they pause to dig up the delicate clam, with savory anticipations of chowder. Farther and farther they wander till their backs are bowed with the spoil, the shell-fish in a little basket, the scaly fish strung together by a small rope passing through their gills. The boy carries the shad and the man the heavier salmon. At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene, the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds, the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty.

“Come along, sonny,” says his father, looking back.

But the boy lingers still till the man rejoins him, puzzled.

“What’s in the wind?” he asks. “Is Farmer Wade’s barn on fire?”

“Everythin’s on faar,” says the boy, waving his pitchfork comprehensively. His dialect differs a whit from his more-travelled father’s. In his little God-forsaken corner of Acadia the variously-proportioned mixture of English and American which, with local variations of Lowland and Highland Scotch, North of Ireland brogue and French patois, loosely constitutes a Nova-Scotian idiom, is further tinged with the specific peculiarities that spring from illiteracy and rusticity.

David Strang smiles. “Why, you are like brother Matt,” he says, in amused astonishment. All day his son’s prattle has amused the stranger, but this is a revelation.

“Like your wicked brother Matt?” queries the boy in amaze. David’s smile gleams droller.

“Avast there, you mustn’t hearken to the mother. She knows naught o’ Matt ’cept what I told her. She is Halifax bred, and we lived ’way up country. I ran away to sea, and left him anchored on dad’s farm. When I made port again dad was gone to glory, and Matt to England with a petticoat in tow.”

“But mother said he sold the farm, an’ your share, too.”

“And if he didn’t it’s a pity. He had improved the land, hadn’t he? and I might have been sarved up at fish dinners for all he knew. I don’t hold with this Frenchy law that says all the bairns must share and share alike. The good old Scotch fashion is good ’nough for me—Matt’s the heir, and God bless him.”

“Then why didn’t you marry a Scotchwoman?” asked Matt, with childish irrelevance.

“ ‘Twas your mother’s fault,” answers David, with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic expression.

“And why didn’t you take her to sea with you?”

“Nay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I either. And then there was Harriet—a little body in long clothes. And the land was pretty nigh cleared,” he adds, with a suspicion of apology in his accent, “and we couldn’t grow ’nough to pay the mortgage if I hadn’t shipped again.”

“And why am I like uncle?”

“Oh, he used to be allus lookin’ at the sky—not to find out whether to git the hay in, mind you, but to make little picturs on the sly in the hay-mow on Sundays, and at last he sold the farm and went to London to make ’em.”

Matt’s heart begins to throb—a strange new sense of kinship stirs within him.

“Hev you got any of them thar picturs?” he inquires, eagerly.

“Not one,” says David, shaking his head contemptuously. “His clouds were all right, because clouds may be anything; but when he came to cows, their own dams wouldn’t know ’em; and as for his ships—why, he used to hoist every inch o’ canvas in a hur’cane. I wouldn’t trust him to tattoo a galley-boy. But he had a power of industry, dear old Matt; and I guess he’s larnt better now, for when I writ to him tellin’ him I was alive and goin’ to get spliced, he writ back he was settled in London in the pictur line, and makin’ money at it, and good-luck to him.”

Matt’s heart swells. That one can actually make money by making pictures is a new idea. He has never imagined that money can be made so easily. Why, he might help to pay off the mortgage! He does not see the need of going to London to make them—he can make them quite well here in his odd moments, and one day he will send them all to this wonderful kinsman of his and ask him to sell them. Five hundred at sixpence each—why, it sounds like one of those faëry calculations with which McTavit sometimes dazzles the school-room. He wonders vaguely whether pictures are equally vendible at that other mighty city whence his mother came, and, if so, whether he may not perhaps help her to accomplish the dream of her married life—the dream of going back there.

“An’ uncle’s got the same name as me!” he cries, in ecstasy.

“I should put it t’other way, sonny,” says his father, dryly; “though when I give it you in his honor I didn’t calc’late it ’ud make you take arter him. But don’t you git it into your figurehead that you’re goin’ to London—you’ve jest got to stay right here and look arter the farm for mother. See? The picturs that God’s made are good ’nough for me—that’s so.”

“Oh yes, dad, I shall allus stay on here,” answers Matt, readily. “It’s Billy who allus wants to be a pirate. Silly Billy! He says—”

His father silences him with a sudden “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?” he asks, startled.

“I guess you’re the silly Billy, standin’ jabberin’ when the tide’s a-rushin’ in. We’ll have to run for it.”

Matt gives a hasty glance to the left, then takes to his heels straight across the sands in pace with his father. The famous “bore” of the Bay of Fundy, in a northerly inlet of which they have been fishing, is racing towards them from the left, and to get to shore they must shoot straight across the galloping current. They are at the head of the bay, where the tide reaches a maximum speed of ten miles an hour, and the sailor, so rarely at home, has forgotten its idiosyncrasy.

“You might ha’ kep’ your weather-eye open,” he growls. “I wonder you’ve never been drownded afore.”

“We shall never do it, father,” pants Matt, taking no notice of the reproach, for the waves are already lapping the rim of the little sand island (cut out by fresh-water rivulets) on which they find themselves, and the pools in which they had waded are filling up rapidly.

“Throw ’em away,” jerks the father; and Matt, with a sigh of regret, unstrings his piscine treasures, and, economically putting the string into his pocket, speeds on with renewed strength. But the sun flares mercilessly through the fulgent haze; and when they reach the end of their island they step into three feet of water, with the safe shore a quarter of a mile off. David Strang, a human revolver in oaths, goes off in a favorite sequence of shots, but hangs fire in the middle, as if damped.

“Strikes me the mother ’ll quote Scripture,” he says, grimly, instead.

“I suppose you can’t swim, sonny?” he adds.

“Not so fur nor thet,” says Matt, meekly.

David grunts in triumphant anger, and, shifting his pitchfork to his left hand, he grasps Matt with his right, and lifts him back on to the burning sand, already soddened by a thin frothy wash.

“Now then, han’ us your fork,” he says, crossly. He knocks out the iron prongs of both the pitchforks, ties the wooden handles securely together by the string from Matt’s discarded fish, and fixes the apparatus across the boy’s breast and under his arms. To finish the job easily he has to climb back on the sand island; for, though he stands in a little eddy, it is impossible to keep his feet against the fierce swirl of the waters; and even on the island, where there are as yet only a few inches of sea, the less sturdy Matt is almost swept away to the right by the mad cavalry charge of the tide on his left flank.

“Now then,” cries David, “it’s about time we were home to supper. I’ll swim ye for your flapjacks.”

“But, father,” says Matt, “you’re not going to carry the fish on your back?”

“They won’t carry me on theirs,” David laughs, regaining his good-humor as the critical moment arrives. “What would the mother think if we came home without a prize in tow! Avast there! I’ll larn you how I’ll get out of carryin’ ’em on my back.”

And with a chuckle he launches himself into the eddy, and shoots forward with a vigorous side-stroke. “This side up with care,” he cries cheerily. “Jump, sonny, straight for’ards.” And in a moment the man and the boy are swimming hard for the strip of shore directly opposite the sand island, the spot where they had left their coats hours before; but neither has the slightest expectation of reaching it, for the tide is sweeping them with fearful velocity to the right of it, so that their course is diagonal; and if they make land at all, it will be very far from their original starting-point. David keeps the boy to port, and adjusts his stroke to his. After a while, feeling himself well buoyed up by the handles, Matt breathes more easily, and gradually becomes quite happy, for the water is calm on the surface, and of the warmth and color of tepid café au lait, quite a refreshing coolness after the tropical air, and he watches with pleasure the rosy haze deepening into purple without losing its transparency. They pass sea-gulls fighting over the dead fish which Matt left behind, and which have been carried ahead of him in their unresisting course.

“We’re drifting powerful from them thar coats,” grumbles David. “ ’Twill be a tiresome walk back. If it warn’t for them we could cut across country when we make port.”

Matt strains his vision to the left, but sees only the purple outline of Five Islands, and in the far background the faint peaks of the Cobequid Hills.

“Waal, I’m darned!” exclaims his father, suddenly. “If them thar coats ain’t comin’ to meet us, it’s a pity.”

And presently, sure enough, Matt catches sight of the coats hastening along near the shore.

“We must cut ’em off afore they pass by,” cries his father, hilariously. “Spurt, sonny, spurt. ’Tis a race ’twixt them and us.”

Sea-birds begin to circle low over their heads, scenting David’s fish; but he pushes steadily on, animating his son with playful racing cries.

“We oughter back the coats,” he observes. “They’ve backed us many a time. Just a leetle quicker,” he says, at last, “or they’ll git past yonder p’int, and then they’re off to Truro.”

Matt kicks out more lustily, then his heart almost stops as he suddenly sees Death beneath the lovely purple haze. It is the human swimmers who are in danger of being carried off to Truro if they do not make the shore earlier than “yonder p’int,” for Matt remembers all at once that it is the last point for miles, the shore curving deeply inward. Even if they reach the point in time, they will be thrown back by the centrifugal swirl; they must touch the shore earlier to get in safely. He perceives his father has been aware of the danger from the start, and has been disguising his anxiety under the pretext of racing the coats. He feels proud of this strong, brave man, the cold terror passes from his limbs, and he spurts bravely.

“That’s a little man,” says David; “we’ll catch ’em yet. Lucky it’s sandstone yonder ’stead o’ sand—no fear o’ gettin’ sucked in.”

Now it is the shore that seems racing to meet them—the red reef sticks out a friendly finger, and in another five minutes they are perched upon it, like Gulliver on the Brobdingnagian’s thumb; and what is more, they tie with their coats, meeting them just at the landing-place.

David laughs a long Homeric laugh at the queerness of the incident, quivering like a dog that shakes himself after a swim, and Matt smiles too.

“Them thar sea-birds air a bit off their feed, that’s a fact,” chuckles David, as he surveys his fish; and then the two cut across the forest, drying and steaming in the sun, the elder exhorting the younger to silence, and hiding the prongless pitchforks in the hay-mow before they enter the house, all smiles and salmon.

At the early tea-supper they sit in dual isolation at one end of the table, their chairs close. But lo! Mrs. Strang, passing the hot flapjacks, or “corn-dodgers,” with the superfluous perambulations of an excitable temperament, brushes the back of her hand against Matt’s shoulder, starts, pauses, and brushes it with her palm.

“Why, the boy’s wringin’ wet!” she cries.

“We went wadin’,” David reminds her, meekly.

“Yes, but you don’t wade on your heads,” she retorts.

“I sorter tumbled,” Matt puts in, anxious to exonerate his father.

Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husband’s jacket.

“An’ father kinder stooped to pick me up,” adds Matt.

“You’re a nice Moloch to trust with one’s children!” she exclaims in terrible accents.

David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat drying under it.

“An’ when you kin’t manage to drownd ’em you try to kill ’em with rheumatics, and then I hev all the responsibility. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both o’ you.”

Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces—their shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strang’s voice brings up the rear, and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his oath-repeater—for he never swears before mother and the children except when he is not angry—suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship at St. John’s by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes down to the sea in a ship, and does more business—of a mysterious sort—in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he kisses his bairns and his wife—all amorousness and amiability again—and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so—into the great Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas, all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings; passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny, sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt—no vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green, sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his mother’s face furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep; he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of Harriet’s face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billy’s case Death were no such grisly mystery.

Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy last year’s accident had taken the zest out of Matt’s enjoyment of the ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece—a machine of his own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But this year the glow of the skater’s blood became the heat of remorse when he saw or remembered Billy’s wistful eyes; he gave up skating and contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school at Cobequid Village.

In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the forelock) his father’s death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent (with an emphasis on the “r”) of the “pear’ls of the watter,” and calling for their night’s letters held converse with the postmistress on “the watter and its pear’ls,” and expectorated copiously, presumably in lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in their buffalo robes and “boots”; and it lent an added solemnity to the appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing, balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strang’s from popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow. She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of the “pear’ls of the land,” and walking home from the singing-class the sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of drink, and commiseration for “Ole Hey,” and all the adjacent villages went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum) remarked in his nasal address, “universally respected.” And everybody, including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome graveyard—some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh—a far-stretching, black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences, past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes of the pines.

CHAPTER III
THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH

Other rumors, too, came by coach to the village—rumors of blizzard and shipwreck—each with its opportunities of exhortation and expectoration. But in the lonely forest home, past which the dazzling mail-coach rattled with only a blast on the horn, the tragic end of David Strang stood out in equal loneliness. For Death, when he smites the poor, often cuts off not only the beloved, but the bread-winner; and though, in a literal sense, the Strangs made their own bread, yet it was David who kept the roof over their head and the ground under their feet. But for his remittances the interest on the mortgage, under which they held the farm and the house, could not have been paid, for the produce of the clearing, the bit of buckwheat and barley, barely maintained the cultivators, both Harriet and Matt eking out the resources of the family by earning a little in kind, sometimes even in money. Matt was a skilful soapmaker, decorating his bars with fanciful devices; and he delighted in “sugaring”—a poetic process involving a temporary residence in a log-hut or a lumberman’s cabin in the heart of the forest.

Now that the overdue mortgage money had gone to the bottom of the sea, more money must be raised immediately. That the dead man had any claim upon the consideration of his employers did not occur to the bereaved family; rather, it seemed, he owed the owners compensation for the lost Sally Bell. A family council was held on the evening of the day so blackly begun. Not even the baby was excluded—it sat before the open-doored stove on its mother’s lap and crowed at the great burning logs that silhouetted the walls with leaping shadows. Sprat, too, was present, crouched on “Matt’s mat” (as the children called the rag mat their brother had braided), thrusting forward his black muzzle when the door rattled with special violence, and by his side lay the boy staring into the tumbling flames, yet taking the lead in the council with a new authoritative ring in his voice.

Wherever the realities of life beleaguer the soul, there children are born serious, and experience soon puts an old head on young shoulders. The beady-eyed pappoose that the Indian squaw carries sandwichwise ’twixt back and board does not cry. Dump it down, and it stands stolid like a pawn on a chessboard. Hang it on a projecting knot in the props of a wig-wam, and it sways like a snared rabbit. Matt Strang, strenuous little soul, had always a gravity beyond his years: his father’s removal seemed to equal his years to his gravity. He knew himself the head of the house. Harriet, despite her superior summers, was of the wrong sex, and his mother, though she had physical force to back her, was not a reasoning being. For a time, no doubt, she would be quieted by the peace of the grave which all but the crowing infant felt solemnizing the household, but Matt had no hope of more than a truce.

It was the boy’s brain and the boy’s voice that prevailed at the council-fire. Daisy was to be killed and salted down and sold—fortunately she was getting on in years, and, besides, they could never have had the heart to eat their poor old friend themselves, with her affectionate old nose and her faithful udders. The calves were to become veal, and all this meat, together with the fodder thus set free, Deacon Hailey was to be besought to take at a valuation, in lieu of the mortgage money, for money itself could not be hoped for from Cobequid Village. Though the “almighty dollar” ruled here as elsewhere, it was an unseen monarch, whose imperial court was at Halifax. There Matt might have got current coin, here barter was all the vogue. Accounts were kept in English money; it was not till a few years later that the dollar became the standard coin. For their own eating Matt calculated that he would catch more rabbits and shoot more partridges than in years of yore, and in the summer he would work on neighboring farms. Harriet would have to extend her sewing practice, and collaborate with Matt in making shad-nets for the fishermen, and Mrs. Strang would get spinning jobs from the farmers’ wives. Which being settled with a definiteness that left even a balance of savings, the widow handed the infant in her arms to Harriet, and, replacing it by the big Bible, she slipped on her spectacles with a nervous, involuntary glance round the kitchen, and asked the six-year-old Teddy to stick a finger into the book. Opening the holy tome at that place, she began to read from the head to the end of the chapter in a solemn, prophetic voice that suited with her black cap pinched up at the edges. She had no choice of texts; pricking was her invariable procedure when she felt a call to prelection, and the issue was an uncertainty dubiously delightful; for one day there would be a story or a miracle to stir the children’s blood, and another day a bald genealogy, and a third day a chapter of Revelation, all read with equal reverence as equally inspiring parts of an equally inspired whole.

Matt breathed freely when his mother announced Ezra, chap. x., not because he had any interest in Ezra, but because he knew it was a pictureless portion. When the text was liable to be interrupted by illustrations, the reading was liable to be interrupted by remonstrances, for scarce a picture but bore the marks of his illuminating brush, and his rude palette of ground charcoal, chalk, and berry-juice. He had been prompted to color before his hand itched to imitate, and in later years these episodes of the far East had found their way to planed boards of Western pine, with the figures often in new experimental combinations, and these scenes were in their turn planed away to make room for others equally unsatisfactory to the critical artist. But his mother had never been able to forgive the iniquities of his prime, not even after she had executed vengeance on the sinner. She had brought the sacred volume from her home at Halifax, and a colored Bible she had never seen; color made religion cheerful, destroyed its essential austerity—it could no more be conceived apart from black and white than a minister of the Gospel. An especial grievance hovered about the early chapters of Exodus, for Matt had stained the Red Sea with the reddish hue of the Bay of Fundy—a sacrilege to his mother, to whose fervid imagination the Sea of Miracles loomed lurid with sacred sanguineousness to which no profane water offered any parallel.

But Ezra is far from Exodus, and to-night the reminder was not likely. A gleam of exaltation illumined the reader’s eyes when she read the first verse; at the second her face seemed to flush as if the firelight had shot up suddenly.

“ ‘Now when Ezra hed prayed an’ when he hed confessed, weepin’ an’ castin’ himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children: fur the people wept very sore.

“ ‘An’ Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam, answered an’ said unto Ezra, We hev trespassed against our God, an’ hev taken strange wives of the people of the land....’ ”

She read on, pausing only at the ends of the verses. Harriet knitted stockings over baby’s head; the smaller children listened in awe. Matt’s thoughts soon passed from Shechaniah, the son of Jehiel, uninterested even by his relationship to Elam. Usually when the subject-matter was dull, and when he was tired of watching the wavering shadows on the gray-plastered walls, he got up a factitious interest by noting the initial letter of each verse and timing its length, in view of his Sunday-school task of memorizing for each week a verse beginning with some specified letter. His verbal memory being indifferent, he would spend hours in searching for the tiniest verse, wasting thereby an amount of time in which he could have overcome the longest; though, as he indirectly scanned great tracts of the Bible, it may be this A B C business was but the device of a crafty deacon skilled in the young idea. However this be, Matt’s mind was deeplier moved to-night. The shriek of the blind wind without contrasted with the cheerful crackle of the logs within, and the woful contrast brought up that weird image destined to haunt him for so long.

He shuddered to think of it—down there in the cold, excluded forever from the warm hearth of life. Was not that its voice in the wind—wailing, crying to be let in, shaking the door? His eyes filled with tears. Vaguely he heard his mother’s voice intoning solemnly.

“ ‘An’ of the sons of Immer; Hanani, and Zebadiah. An’ of the sons of Harim; Maaseiah, an’ Elijah, an’ Shemaiah, an’ Jehiel, an’ Uzziah. An’ of the sons of Pashur....’ ”

The baby was still smiling, and tangling Harriet’s knitting, but Billy had fallen asleep, and presently Matt found himself studying the flicker of the firelight upon the little cripple’s pinched face.

“ ‘An’ of the sons of Zattu; Elioenai, Eliashib, Mattaniah, an’ Jeremoth, an’ Zabad, an’ Aziza. Of the sons also of Bebai....’ ”

The prophetic voice rose and fell unwaveringly, unwearyingly.

“Don’t you think I ought to write and tell Uncle Matt?” came suddenly from the brooding boy’s lips.

“Silence, you son of Belial!” cried his mother indignantly. “How dare you interrupt the chapter, so near the end, too! Uncle Matt, indeed! What’s the mortal use of writin’ to him, I should like to know? Do you think he’s likely to repent any, to disgorge our land? Why, he don’t deserve to know his brother’s dead, the everlastin’ Barabbas. If he’d hed to do o’ me he wouldn’t hev found it so easy to make away with our inheritance, I do allow, and my poor David would hev been alive, and to home here with us to-night, thet’s a fact. Christ hev mercy on us all.” She burst into tears, blistering the precious page. Harriet ceased to ply her needles; they seemed to be going through her bosom. The baby enjoyed a free hand with the wool. Billy slept on. Presently Mrs. Strang choked back her sobs, wiped her eyes, and resumed in a steady, reverential voice:

“ ‘Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, Azareel, an’ Shelemiah, Shemariah, Shallum, Amariah, an’ Joseph. Of the sons of Nebo; Jeiel, Mattithiah, Zabad, Zebina, Jadau, an’ Joel, Benaiah.

“ ‘All these hed taken strange wives, an’ some of them hed wives by whom they hed children.’ ”

Her voice fell with the well-known droop that marked the close. “Anyways,” she added, “I don’t know your uncle’s address. London is a big place—considerable bigger nor Halifax; an’ he’ll allow we want to beg of him. Never!” She shut the book with an emphatic bang, and Matt rose from Sprat’s side and put it away.

“Of course, I sha’n’t go back to school any more,” he said, lightly, remembering the point had not come up.

“Oh yes, you will.” His mother’s first instinct was always of contradiction.

“I may get a job an’ raise a little money towards the mortgage.”

“What job kin you get in the winter?”

“Why, I kin winnow wheat some,” he reminded her, “an’ chop the neighbors’ wood, an’ sort the vegetables in their cellars.”

“An’ whatever you make by thet,” she reminded him, “you’ll overbalance by what you’d be givin’ away to the school-master. You’ve paid Alic McTavit to the end o’ the season.”

“I guess you’re off the track this load o’ poles, mother,” said Matt, amused by her muddled finance.

Yet it was the less logical if even more specious argument of completing the snow months (for only young and useless children went to school in the summer) that appealed to him. The human mind is strangely under the sway of times and seasons, and the calendar is the stanchest ally of sloth and procrastination, and so Mrs. Strang settled in temporary triumph to her task of making new black mourning dresses for the girls out of her old merino, and a few days afterwards, when Matt had carried out his financial programme satisfactorily (except that Deacon Hailey’s valuation did not afford the estimated surplus), he joined the other children in their pilgrimage schoolward. The young Strangs amounted to a procession. At its head came Matt, drawing Billy on a little hand-sled by a breast-rope that came through the auger-holes in the peaks of the runners, and the end of Sprat, who sneaked after the children, formed a literal tail to it, till, arriving too far to be driven back, the animal ran to the front in fearless gambollings. This morning the air was keen and bright, the absence of wind preventing the real temperature from being felt, and the sun lit up the white woods with cold sparkle. Ere the children had covered the two miles most of them conceived such a new appetite that their fingers itched to undo their lunch packets. A halt was called, the bread-and-molasses was unwrapped, and while the future was being recklessly sacrificed to the present by the younger savages, Matt edified them by drawing on the snow with the point of Billy’s crutch. They followed the development of these designs with vociferous anticipation, one shouting, “A cow,” and another “Ole Hey” before more than a curve was outlined. Matt always amused himself by commencing at the most unlikely part of the figure, and working round gradually in unexpected ways, so as to keep the secret to the last possible moment. Sometimes, when it had been guessed too early, he would contrive to convert a fox into a moose, his enjoyment of his dexterity countervailing the twinge of his conscience. To-day all the animals were tamer than usual. The boy drew listlessly, abstractedly, unresentful when his secret was guessed in the first stages. And at last, half of itself, the crutch began to shape a Face—a Face with shut eyes and dripping hair, indefinably uncanny.

“Father!” cried Ted, in thick, triumphant tones, exultation tempered by mastication. But the older children held their breath, and Teddy’s exclamation was succeeded by an awesome silence. Suddenly a sagging bough snapped and fell, the collie howled, and Matt, roused from his reverie, saw that Billy’s face had grown white as the dead snow. The child was palsied with terror; Matt feared one of his fits was coming on. In a frenzy of remorse he blurred out the face with the crutch, and hustled the sled forward, singing cheerily:

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child,
Pity my simplicity,
And suffer me to come to Thee.”

The children took up the burden, sifting themselves instinctively into trebles and seconds in a harmony loud enough to rouse the hibernating bear. Billy’s face returned to its normal pallor, and Matt’s to its abstraction.

In the school-room—a bare, plastered room, cold and uninviting, with a crowd of boys and girls at its notched pine desks—he continued pensive. There was nothing to distract his abstraction, for even Ruth Hailey was away. The geography lesson roused him to a temporary attention. London flitted across his dreams—the Halifax of England, that mighty city in which pictures were saleable for actual coin, and a mighty picture-maker, the Matt Strang of England, was paid for play as if for work. But the reading-book, with its menu of solid stories and essays, peppered with religious texts, restored him to his reveries. McTavit, who was shaping quills with his knife, called upon him to commence the chapter; but he stared at the little pedagogue blankly, unaware of the call. He was noting dreamily how his jagged teeth showed beneath the thin, snuffy upper lip, and the trick the mouth had of remaining wide open after it had ceased talking. He tried to analyze why McTavit was not smiling. Months ago, seeking to make his figures smile, the boy had discovered the rident effect of a wide mouth, and now he essayed to analyze the subtle muscular movements that separate the sublime from the ridiculous. Suddenly the haunting thought recurred to him with a new application. Even McTavit’s freckled face would one day be frozen—those twitching eyelids still, the thin wide lips shut forever. How long more would he stride about his motley school-room, scattering blows and information? Would he come to a stop in the school-room as the clock sometimes did, grown suddenly silent, its oil congealed by the intense cold? Or would Death find him in bed, ready stretched? And the restless boys and girls around him—good God!—they, too, would one day be very peaceful—mere blocks—Carroty Kitty, who was pinching Amy Warren’s arm, and Peter Besant, who was throwing those pellets of bread, and even Simon the Sneak’s wagging tongue would be still as a plummet. They would all grow rigid alike, not all at once, nor in one way, but some very soon, perhaps, and others when they were grown tall, and yet others when they were bent and grizzled; some on sea and some on land, some in this part of the map and some in that, some peacefully, some in pain; petrified one by one, ruthlessly, remorselessly, impartially; till at last all the busy hubbub was hushed, and of all that lively crew of youngsters not one was left to feel the sun and the rain. The pity of it thrilled him; even McTavit’s freckled face grew softer through the veil of mist. Then, as his vision cleared, he saw the face was really darker: strange emotions seemed to agitate it.

“So ye’re obstinate, are ye?” it screamed, with startling suddenness. At the same instant something shining flew through the air, and, whizzing past Matt’s ear, sent back a little thud from behind. Matt turned his head in astonishment, and saw a penknife quivering in the wall. He turned back in fresh surprise, and saw that McTavit’s face had changed, lobster-like, from black to red, as its owner realized how near had been Matt’s (and his own) escape.

“Eh, awake at last, sleepy-head,” he blustered. “There’s na gettin’ your attention. Well, what are ye starin’ at? Are ye na goin’ to fetch me my knife?”

“I’m not a dog,” answered Matt, sullenly.

“Then dinna bark! Ye think because ye’ve lost your father ye’re preevileged—to lose your manners,” he added, with an epigrammatic afterthought that mollified him more than an apology. “I’m verra obleeged to you,” he concluded, with elaborate emphasis, as Simon the Sneak handed him the knife.

“Now, then, sleepy-head,” he said again, “p’r’aps ye’ll read your paragraph—that’s richt, Simon; show him the place.”

McTavit hailed from Cape Breton Isle, and was popularly supposed to soliloquize in Gaelic. This hurt him when he proposed to the postmistress, who had been to boarding-school in Truro. She declared she would not have a man who did not speak good English.

“I do speak guid English,” he protested, passionately. “Mebbe not in the school-room, when I’m talkin’ only to my pupils, and it dinna matter, but in private and in society I’m most parteecular.”

McTavit was still a bachelor, and still spoke guid English. When the reading-lesson had come to an end, Matt was left again to his own thoughts, for while poor McTavit gave the juniors an exercise in grammar which they alleviated by gum-chewing, Matt and a few other pupils were allotted the tranquillizing task of multiplying in copy-books £3949 17s. 11¾d. by 7958. The sums were so colossal that Matt wondered whether they existed in the world; and if so, how many pictures it would be necessary to make to obtain them. An awful silence brooded over the room, for when written exercises were on, the pupils took care to do their talking silently, lest they should be suspected of copying, this being what they were doing. There was a little museum case behind McTavit’s desk, containing stuffed skunks and other animals and local minerals lovingly collected by him—stilbite and heulandite and quartz and amethyst and spar and bits of jasper and curiously clouded agate, picked up near Cape Blomidon amid the débris of crumbling cliffs. At such times McTavit would stand absorbed in the contemplation of his treasures, his rod carelessly tucked under his arm, as one “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Then the tension of silence became positively painful, for the school-room had long since discovered that the museum case was a reflector, and McTavit, though he prided himself on the secret of his Argus eye, never caught any but novices not yet initiated into the traditions. Imagine, therefore, the shock both to him and the room, when to-day the acute stillness was broken by a loud cry of “Bang! bang! bang!” An irresistible guffaw swept over the school, and under cover of the laughter the cute and ready collogued as to “answers.”

“Silence!” thundered McTavit. “Who was that?”

In the even more poignant silence of reaction a small still voice was heard.