death came to oust David Strang's from popular favour; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, comLined 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 under-garments 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 zig-zag 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 rumours, too, came by coach to the village-rumours 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, couched 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 papoose 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 chess-board. Hang it on a projecting knot in the props of a wigwam, 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 that peace of the grave which all but the crowing infant felt solemnising 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 soldfortunately 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 no-e 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 neighbouring 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 colour 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 coloured Bible she had never seen; colour 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 an' women an' children: fur the people wept very sore.

666 '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 grey 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

memorising 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 woeful 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 for ever 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' 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 an' 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, an' my poor David would hev been alive, an' 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, She

C