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 uncoloured 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

a prayer."

them up well. We'll say

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 coloured 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-yearold 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 an' say a prayer for him, you mischeevious little imp."

Billy, thus suddenly apostrophised, paled with nervous fright. His big grey 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 'r 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 for ever! and, indeed, it had been sufficiently stamped upon 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 well-nigh jab each other's toes with their pitchforks, and completely tear each other's shirtsleeves 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 colouring 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 savoury 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 homewards, 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 seaweed and shells, the background of red headlands, 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're 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 says 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?" asks Matt, with childish irrelevance.

""Twas your mother's fault," answers David, with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic expression.

"An' why didn't you take her to sea with you?”

"Nay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I neither. 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."

"An' 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 haymow 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 M'Tavit sometimes dazzles the schoolroom. 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.

He

"I should put it t'other way, sonny," says his father drily; "though when I give it you in his honour 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