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The Only Girl: A Tale of 1837

THE RED COACH.

“Let us run, Robin. If we make haste we shall just see the coach.”

Little Robin grasped the firm, brown hand stretched out to him, and the pair flew, helter-skelter, along the narrow forest track.

But in a second or two Robin was gasping, “We can’t get there. You run, Peggy—and—tell me.”

“Nonsense, boy. Come along.”

The pale little fellow was hopelessly out of breath. “I can’t, Peggy. You run,” he repeated. “But oh, I should like to have seen it—just for once.”

“You shall see it,” and, throwing down the heavy bundle of homespun she was carrying home from the weaver’s, Peggy stooped, commanded Robin to get on her back and hurried along faster than before.

“What’s that music?” cried the small boy excitedly.

“It’s the horn. Hold tight, Bobby,” and she raced on, scrambling over dead trunks, splashing unconcernedly through the little creeks that crossed her path, for she was barefoot and her skirts were as short as and a good deal wider than those worn by the fashionable misses of to-day.

“We shall never get there in time,” complained Robin querulously.

“Don’t you fear, Bobby. You know how it rained last night? The coach is bound to stick in the soft spot near the bridge to-day. Some folk say that mud-hole has no bottom, for, no matter what they put down, it swallows it right up in a week or two. We’ll surely catch them there.”

“They’re stuck safe enough,” shrieked Robin in high delight. “I hear them—shouting like mad. Gee up, Peggy.”

“Gee up, indeed! It’s a bad road for a poor old horse, Bobby.”

“Eh! but you’re a grand horse, Peggy. We’ll make it yet.”

Peggy had her doubts, despite the stick-fast qualities of the mud in the famous soft spot. The pace was beginning to tell and Robin seemed to be growing heavier every moment. Suddenly she put her foot into a hole and came down on her hands and knees, bespattering herself with mud from her neck to her ankles.

Up again in an instant, despite the weight on her back, she said ruefully, “That settles it, Robin boy. I can’t face the folk, such a sight as I am! I ought not to go after them barefoot any way, and me nearly seventeen. Father’s always reminding me that ‘a Lydgate ought to try to be a lady’.”

Robin began to cry. “I did think I should see the coach to-day,” he wailed.

“S’sh, Robin, let me think. Listen, if you’ll be as still as a mouse and not make a noise so that folk will look our way, we’ll try to get to the Twin Oaks and then, if you’re very good, I’ll put you up on a big bough and you’ll see right over the roof of the coach and the backs of the horses. Robin boy, it’s a grand team. Four spanking horses and, when it’s good travelling and they are fresh, they go like the wind! They’ll be pretty fresh now, for they always change at the Blue Boar.”

Robin laughed through his tears. “If you put me up in the tree, Peggy, I’ll be gooder than I’ve ever been in my life.”

The girl picked her way cautiously now, pausing before crossing the road to look up and down and to assure herself by the shouts, trampling of horses and intermittent rattling of wheels that the coach was not yet clear of the slough. Then she plunged across the ruts and churned-up mud of that famous pioneer highway, Dundas Street, to a little knoll, crowned by a magnificent white oak with two trunks rising from one root. One of the trunks was particularly easy to climb, though as a matter of fact Peggy was not more readily daunted by difficulty in climbing any ordinary tree than was the best woodsman of her many brothers. She often used trees for watch-towers, loving especially to ensconce herself amongst the branches of the Twin Oaks when the mail for Toronto or Hamilton was due to pass.

Now she made Robin stand on her shoulders against the tree and so helped him to scramble to the crotch of a huge arm—for him a daring adventure filling him with a fearful joy and pride. But when Peggy swung herself up beside him, cuddling him close, Robin forgot how far he was above the ground and gave himself wholeheartedly to watching that narrow brown thread of a road, which so soon lost itself amongst the trees, down in the hollow.

They were children of the forest. Even Peggy’s memories were all of small clearings and vast woods, though ever present to her mind was the background—grey or blue or many-tinted—of Lake Ontario, setting a limit to the forest five or six miles to the southward of the bush farm in Halton County, where she was born. She loved the distant glimpses of the lake the more that it stood to her for the open road to the great wide world of which she knew so little and dreamed so much. By that road her great-grandfather, the Loyalist sea-captain, had brought his family to Canada when all was lost in the old “Thirteen Colonies.” By the same road her own father had travelled up into his Land of Promise when he came as a lad from his English home; and the sight of a far-distant sail or a trailing smoke-cloud from the tall funnel of a steamboat was to Peggy an exciting event, hinting at the unknown, beautiful possibilities of life.

And she loved also this other road, Dundas Street, which went in such determined fashion past woods and farms and knots of houses, up hill and down, all the way from Toronto to Hamilton and even farther westward. Some travelled folk miscalled Dundas Street, but they did not know what it meant to live back in the country where the roads were no more than bush trails and were almost impassable save in the winter when frost gave them a firm foundation and the snow smoothed over the rocks and tree-roots and the corduroy of the swampy places. Peggy agreed with her neighbours in regarding Dundas Street as one of the blessings of life (though to reach it from her home meant a rough walk of over a mile and a half) and if she envied any one it was those fortunate people who lived beside the road and saw something passing every day.

The Lydgates’ clearing was a little islet of cultivation surrounded by big stretches of unimproved land belonging to the Government or to absentee landlords, but the family was so large and so busy that it found loneliness a contemptible foe. Poverty was another matter; and they were very poor, for Mr. Lydgate, though well brought up and well educated had been singularly unfortunate.

Very soon after his arrival in Upper Canada, in 1811, he had been persuaded to invest his little capital in a two-hundred-acre farm, uncleared except for a little patch of three or four acres and lacking any buildings save a poor one-roomed shanty. But Lesley Lydgate was making a good beginning on his arduous task of felling the trees and cultivating his little patch of open ground when his second summer’s work was interrupted by the call to arms to defend the country from invasion from the United States.

What young man could hang back at such a call? Not Lydgate, at any rate. He sold his yoke of oxen and his chickens—his only live stock—nailed up the door of his shanty, left his little fields to take care of themselves and enlisted with those brave York Volunteers who followed General Brock so gallantly up the Heights of Queenston. He served through the war unscathed till the midnight battle at Lundy’s Lane. Shot through the body, he was left for dead till a gallant comrade-in-arms, Harry Sumner, son of a Loyalist, discovered that he was still breathing, had his wounds dressed and sent him to his own home in Stamford.

All the Sumners, parents, married daughters, the young men in the defensive army, the youngest girl—sprightly, bright-eyed Mary—were doing “their bit” to save the country. The girl and her mother, overburdened though they were during those toilsome anxious days, nursed Lydgate back to life, and, when peace came, Mary could not find it in her heart to let him return to his dismal shanty all alone. They were married in the early spring of 1815 and, full of hope and courage, began the making of a farm from that bit of wilderness that Lesley owned north of Dundas Street and a little west of the Sixteen Mile Creek.

Mary brought to her husband the help not only of her willing hands and cheerful temper but of her experience in pioneer farming and housekeeping. The one drawback of the high development of her talents in practical matters was that she was always busy with knitting-needles or spinning-wheel, candle-moulds or bake-kettle, hoe or pitchfork, and found no time for the lessons by which Lesley hoped to make up for her lack of scholastic education. The Sumners, though keenly observant and quick in picking up knowledge from the people they delighted to meet, were not generally bookish, and Mary secretly wondered at her husband’s love for books, until he began to read to her occasionally as she sewed or knitted. Then she regretted her own deficiencies and, when her babies came, resolved that they should have a better chance than she had had. But the readings were brief and far between, for both had to work early and late to clear more land, pay the money owing on the farm and build a real log house in place of the leaky shanty, which henceforth did duty for a cow-stable.

A year or two of happiness and prosperity in the new house was followed by a terrible disaster. On a biting winter’s night when Robin was still a baby, the big chimney caught fire. It spread to roof and walls, and morning found the Lydgates homeless and stripped of almost everything they possessed. Nor was this the worst. Mr. Lydgate, in his desperate efforts to put out the fire, received injuries that endangered his life and resulted in the loss of his sight.

Afterwards his wife used to say that “it was good neighbours who saved the family”. And certainly the neighbours did nobly, sheltering the unfortunates through the remainder of the winter, helping to nurse the injured man, clothing the children from their own scanty stores, and at last building a better house than that destroyed.

On the other hand, it was generally conceded that the distressed family had shown “what good stuff it was made of”. If Mrs. Lydgate ever lost heart she kept the secret to herself, and her husband, though stunned at first by the blow, took his deprivation (when he came to himself) with quiet courage, and year by year grew more gentle and uncomplaining in his shut-in life. But he by no means resigned himself to being helpless. As strength to some extent returned, he schooled himself to do all kinds of work about the house and thus lightened the labour of his wife and children who, with the help now and then of a compassionate neighbour, shouldered the heavy work of the farm.

They did just manage to keep the wolf from the door, but it was so grim a fight that there was never a penny to spend on anything save the barest necessaries, and never a week when a child old enough and strong enough to undertake the long walk to the nearest school could be spared from the incessant toil to wring a living from their little patches of cleared land and the surrounding woods, which yielded wild fruits and “wild meat” to pioneers who knew their business.

Peggy, the only girl of the family, in her childish days a little tomboy, had grown up good-looking, tall and strong, with bright dark eyes, a curly dark mane that showed warmly brown in the sunshine, and a complexion suggestive of the out-of-doors in its wild-rose beauty. She was free-and-easy in her manners as in her swinging gait, self-satisfied regarding her many boyish accomplishments, yet she had from the first constituted herself her blind father’s special protector and had tried to be to him not only “his little right-hand”, as he called her, but his eyes.

For him, she pictured all the happenings of the forest—the budding of the oaks, the springing of the May-flowers, the arrival of the first blue-bird, the watch kept by some great bald-headed eagle in the top of a tall pine. For him, she sang every lively air she heard at corn-huskings or quilting bees. For him, she learned by heart the hymns and verses that the mothers of the settlement used to repeat to their children, for he loved music and poetry but books were almost impossible to come by. Only one of the few volumes Lesley Lydgate had possessed before the fire came through that catastrophe (and even that was scorched and charred) but it was the pocket Bible, which had been his mother’s parting gift to him. This and an old newspaper or two formed the Lydgates’ library.

Unhappily no one could make much use of it. When blindness gave him time for such work, Mr. Lydgate had tried to teach Peggy to read, but she could spare only an hour now and then for a task not bearing on the absolute necessities of life. Moreover it was slow learning from a man who could only suggest the letters he could not see by tracing their shapes on some bit of wood with a blackened stick. And these vague tracings were all the harder to grasp because Peggy almost always took her rare lessons by firelight.

One lesson stood out in her memory beyond and above the rest. On a bright autumn morning a kindly neighbour, Simon Hurd by name, took the blind man and his little daughter in his wagon to Oakville, and there Peggy had the lesson in the damp sand by the Lake. On his knees near the water, Lesley traced the whole alphabet in the firm smooth sand, joyful because he could feel the shapes he was making. Thus he taught his Peggy to write her name, Margaret Lydgate, his fingers lingering lovingly over the girl’s irregular round hand, as he thought of the two—his mother and this little girl—for whom the dear name stood.

The lesson ended abruptly with laughter, when a frolicsome wave suddenly blotted out the writing and splashed the writing-master.

That was years ago, but Peggy still found it necessary to “skip and go on” over hard words, and her writing for want of a competent critic was just as sprawling and uneven as on the day she first signed her name in the sand.

Still, as in her enterprising babyhood, her father’s severest mark of disapproval of any of her wild pranks was “What would grandmother think of you?” Sometimes her mother, who knew how naturally the boyish antics came to a girl brought up in the backwoods amongst a band of brothers, tried to cover her exuberances of energy and spirits with the old adage, “You can’t put grey heads on green shoulders”; but Lesley’s ideal of womanhood was the gentle English lady at whose knee he had drunk in his first conceptions of God and goodness and beauty. Unconsciously he so impressed her image on the mind of his daughter that the vision of a sweetly disapproving old lady, in a dainty white cap and a rustling shot silk dress, often came between Peggy and her ambition to beat the boys at their own tasks or sports.

Though so “early Victorian” that she was only a year younger than the girl who was soon to become Queen of England, Peggy was not afraid either of mice or wolves, and as for being worried about her complexion—that bugbear of properly brought up little ladies of her day—she loved to go bareheaded in all sorts of weather. Nevertheless something had to be conceded to “Granny’s” supposed ideas of what was right and seemly. Now, as she held Robin fast in his unaccustomed perch on the great bough, she tried to draw up her muddy toes under her soiled skirts, achieving a very awkward posture, because it had occurred to her that Granny would not like her to sit barefoot for the grand folk on the coach to see.

She looked as proper and uncomfortable as possible when a merry voice hailed her from below, “Hey, Peggy, why are you and Robin roosting up there?”

The speaker was the youngest son of Simon Hurd, a fortunate person whose farm abutted on Dundas Street a little to the westward of the Twelve Mile Creek, and the freshlooking, fair-haired, well-dressed lad of nineteen, had enjoyed what the Lydgates thought extraordinary educational advantages, for he had lived for half-a-dozen years with his mother’s father in Toronto, so that he might go to school uninterruptedly. This grandfather was a prosperous merchant, who owned several lake schooners, and Frank was now employed in his office. But his father also was a clever business man, who besides his good farm, owned a sawmill on the Twelve Mile Creek. He was, however, as much interested in public affairs as in business, and it was his dream that his youngest son should live to make his mark in the service of his country.

Whether or not that was to be, the lad was a general favourite, fairly bubbling over with friendliness and good humour. He was always “spouting poetry” or discovering some grand new story and he loved to share his interest in whatever was uppermost in his mind with Peggy. But she had a queer pride where Frank was in question, and his superior knowledge and easy manners often made her unhappily conscious of her own deficiencies. Now, as he came under their tree, Peggy noticed a little book sticking out of his pocket, and it seemed a symbol of the world he lived in which was so different from her own. But Frank always insisted gaily that he really belonged to the country more than the town.

“Tell me, what are you doing?” he repeated.

“We’re waiting for Robin to see the coach.”

“It’s stuck in the mire,” said Robin gleefully.

“Is it? I wish I could stay and see it too, but I can’t, for mother wants me to get this kettle of soup to old Mrs. Anderson while it’s hot. I’m just in the humour to stay and see the coach, Bobby; but a boy must obey his mother, you know.” With a wave of his hand he disappeared into the bush.

“Perhaps he’ll get back in time,” exclaimed Robin breathlessly.

It was not to be. With a mighty thumping and rumbling and jolting, a furious cracking of the whip, a mad tooting of the horn, the crimson monster just then lurched up the hill into view.

“Oh! oh! oh!” shrieked Robin, jerking himself up and down on his bough like an absurd little squirrel. “The coach!”

“Yes, it’s the coach,” replied Peggy, almost squeezing the breath out of his little body in her anxiety lest he should fall. “Did you ever think it would be so big and so red?”

“It’s like a house, only it’s on wheels and it has six people on the top,” said the small boy in awestruck tones. “I shouldn’t wonder if it would hold all our family. Aren’t those beautiful, beautiful horses, all four of them? Peggy, when I’m grown-up I’m going to drive the mail. Isn’t he a lovely driver? and oh! look at that strange little man behind him. I think he must be very angry. Just see how he is waving his arms and shaking his fist at the other man. He’s standing up. He’ll fall, he’ll fall, Peggy, or knock the other man off with his big book.”

“Don’t look at him, if you don’t like him, Robin.”

The boy was fascinated by the swaying figure. “I know,” he said sagely, “he’s just drunk.” There was so much drunkenness in those days that even little children were accustomed to its signs.

“He is angry,” returned Peggy. There was indeed no mistake about that.

“There is no help for us if we don’t help ourselves,” he was shouting at the top of his voice, and he flourished his book so close to the face of his opponent that the latter struck it away and sent it flying through the air towards the Twin Oaks.

“Stop, stop!” cried the little dancing man to the coachman. “This fellow has thrown away my book.”

“Stop? not I. I’m over an hour behind time and I’ll stop for no one,” retorted the coachman over his shoulder.

“Well, if you won’t, you won’t,” answered the excitable passenger with sudden good humour. “I’m in a hurry myself.”

Just then he caught a glimpse of the pair in the tree and called with a distinctness won by much practice in open-air oratory, “Hi, there, youngsters, that’s a good book. Pick it up and take it home as a keepsake from William Lyon Mackenzie.”

“Oh, thank you, sir,” cried Peggy and Robin together, the former adding “I must get down. Hold tight, Robin.”

She pounced on the treasure and wiped the mud from its green cover on her long-suffering skirt, then she opened the book reverently. At the beginning was a picture of two men in strange clothing, mounted on horseback and rushing at one another with long spears.

“Are they fighting?” demanded Robin, hanging almost head downward from his tree.

Peggy looked up, rescued the child and turned again to the new treasure. A mysterious word shone out from its cover in gilt letters, a long word that had no meaning to Peggy. It was “Talisman”.

“Robin, dear, don’t you hope it’s a good book?” she said. “Father would be so dreadfully disappointed if it wasn’t. That is such a very queer word and William Lyon Mackenzie seems queer too.”

“It’s a lovely book,” asserted the child, whose faith was more robust than Peggy’s. “Let’s take it home to father, quick. He’ll know what T—A-L, T-A-L—whatever it is means.”

Peggy kissed him. “Of course he will, you darling.”

“And, oh, Peggy, it’s been the beautifullest day. We’ve really, truly seen the coach and we heard the horn toot and we’ve got a grand book. Let us run, Peggy.”

“We must,” said Peggy. “It’s growing dusk. We must get the homespun while we can see.”

“And if we lost ourselves,” suggested Robin, with an uneasy glance at the darkening woods, “the bears might get the book and then wouldn’t you be sorry, if father never saw it and we never knew what the queer T-A-L—”

“I-S-M-A-N,” finished Peggy.

“The queer S-M-A-N word means?”

When they got back to where they had left the homespun, Peggy tied up the book in the centre of the bundle saying, as she hoisted it to her shoulders, “When we get home, we are going to give father the surprise of his life, Robin. We won’t say a thing about the coach or the book. We’ll just ask him what that queer word means?”

“Suppose we forget it?”

“We are not going to forget it. We are going to say it all the way home.”

And they did. Hurrying along the woodland path, they chanted, as their great-grandchildren now practise their college yells, “T-A-L I-S M-A-N, Talisman.”

“TALISMANS AND SPELLS.”

“My dear children, what has kept you?” asked Lesley Lydgate, as Peggy and Robin burst tumultuously in upon the family at the supper table.

“It was the ‘T-A-L I-S M-A-N’ ”, they chanted in unison.

“The Talisman? What are you talking of, Peggy?”

“Father, what is a talisman?” she cried.

“A charm. A sort of magic that people used to think would cure diseases or keep away evil. But what do you mean?”

“Peggy and Robin, what have you been doing?”—this from their mother.

“Let me tell,” piped Robin, rushing at her and catching her round the neck. “It’s been the wonderfullest day! Peggy, she took me on her back and ran, and ran, and we climbed into the Twin Oaks and saw the coach, the great, big, red coach! And a man on the top quarrelled with another man and threw a—a keepsake—at us, and it wasn’t a stone but a grand book with the queer word on its outside.”

Now it was Peggy’s turn. Every tongue was still, while, with shining eyes and burning cheeks, she untied the roll of cloth. At any other time this would itself have been the occasion of joyful excitement, for new clothes were a rare event in this pioneer family, but for once no one had a word to say in praise of the new cloth. When the book at last appeared there was a hubbub of exclamations.

“Father first,” said Peggy putting the treasure into Lydgate’s hand. “The letters are cut in like those we made on the sand. Feel them, darling.”

He passed his fingers over the lettering and shook his head, “They are too small for me, little daughter.”

“Never mind, father. It’s just ‘The Talisman’, and another word, S-C-O-T-T, below.”

The blind man’s face lighted up. “Scott? Now I have it. The author of ‘Waverley’. Oh, we have a treat in store. I used to read his novels when I was a lad at home. To think I should have lived to have but the One Book in the house.”

“Of all your books, the only one you tried to save that night,” said Mrs. Lydgate, looking at her husband anxiously, for his face was pale and his hands were shaking.

“Yes, Mary, you do well to remind me. We were fortunate to save that, most fortunate.”

Here Robin, who had been watching every change in his father’s face, put in, “ ‘The Talisman’ is a good book, isn’t it, father?”

“Yes, yes. I’m sure it is.”

“Peggy was afraid, because the dancing man was so queer and the word was so queer too, but I wasn’t afraid.”

Peggy laughed, and her father continued, “We used to call Scott ‘the Great Magician’ so ‘The Talisman’ is a good name for a book of his. But, Peggy, are you sure the man meant it for you? Perhaps he let it fall by accident?”

“It was an accident in a way, father. But Pete Dimsdale would not stop to let him get down to pick it up and he called to us, ‘Hi! children, take it home as a keepsake from William Lyon Mackenzie’.”

“Mackenzie? Why, Peggy, that’s the man who was Mayor of Toronto the year before last, the man who is by rights member for York, though they won’t let him take his seat in the Assembly because he’s bound to make this a country that will at least get fair play.”

“I am afraid of him and his wild speeches,” said Mrs. Lydgate; but the subject dropped when Robin struck in, “Father, mayn’t we keep the book?”

“Yes, yes, if you are quite sure he gave it to you, Peggy?”

“Quite sure, father.”

“Then get your supper, children, and, boys, hurry with the chores, and Peggy shall begin reading the book aloud this very night, if she will.”

“Wasn’t it this same man, Scott, Lesley,” said Mrs. Lydgate thoughtfully, “who made some mistake about his money and wouldn’t hear of any one losing by him, but wrote and wrote to pay off his debts until he died? Do you remember how the minister read it to us out of the paper that told he was dead? I’m proud and glad to have one of his books in the house.”

Peggy left her place at the table, went round and kissed her mother, she was so glad that she should give the book such a hearty welcome.

The chores were done that night in record time and when every one was settled round the fire with some kind of quiet task—Mr. and Mrs. Lydgate both knitting, Robin winding yarn, and the elder boys cutting out spiles with their knives for the sugarmaking in the spring—Peggy sat down close to the candle and in her best style began to read. Of course she stumbled now and then, but that did not interfere with the wonder-working spell of the Great Magician, which transported them far from their forest home to the burning desert beside the Dead Sea, to watch breathlessly the startling encounter between the turbaned Saracen and the steel-clad Scottish knight. With the exception of Mr. Lydgate they knew nothing of the world of romance, save so far as imagination coloured the old tales of war and pioneering that passed from mouth to mouth, and Peggy especially was so eager to explore the marvels of the strange paths into which her feet had strayed that she all but forgot the difficulties of the way.

Thanks indeed to her father’s quickness in helping her over each hard word before it was half-spelled, the reading went comparatively smoothly, and Peggy’s sympathetic rendering of the story covered a multitude of sins in the way of mispronunciation. She grew dramatic over the surprising truce that ended the combat, and when she paused for breath at the end of the first chapter, her father was overwhelmed by the boys with questions about deserts and Crusaders, armour and Arab horses. But Peggy was silent in wonder and delight.

Every night that week she read a chapter of this “Tale of the Crusaders” and every day this furnished endless food for conversation and speculation and questions, which Lesley Lydgate said it would take an encyclopædia to answer; but he was very happy in the children’s sudden awakening of interest in the hitherto unknown world of books. Under the stimulus his own mind worked with a force and clearness it had never known since his accident. All sorts of memories of the books he had read, the places he had seen, the people he had known, came to the surface, and his boys gained new respect for their quiet father, who possessed such undreamed-of treasures of wisdom.

It was the fourth evening of the reading, and the family, having gone unwillingly to bed on the previous night leaving the Saracen and the Knight of the Leopard asleep in the mad hermit’s cell, had made preternatural haste with their after-supper duties, in order to learn without delay what happened to the adventurers.

Peggy had lighted her candle, had washed her hands, had opened, not only her book, but her mouth—beginning “Chapter IV. Kenneth the Scot—” when there was a double knock.

A low murmur of disappointment or indignation went round the circle, but the eldest brother, John, sprang to open the door, and, after a short colloquy ushered in a little, old, grey-headed man, who greeted them with a comprehensive “Good evening” and sat down in the chimney corner.

“Good evening, Stephen, and how are you to-night?” inquired the master of the house.

“Tidy, sir, thank you,” was the answer. “And how’s yourself?”

The youngsters groaned inwardly. They knew Steve Bennett of old. He was indeed their nearest neighbour, living on Dundas Street, and they were painfully aware that if he had merely come to borrow a hammer or a handful of salt, his habits of circumlocution would make the errand last all evening.

The elder boys looked at Peggy, sitting bolt upright at the table, with her book spread open before her; and they despaired.

It took Robin to save the situation. Rising from his place by his mother and sticking both hands into his little trousers’ pockets, he swaggered up to the visitor and said at once pleasantly and pompously, “Have you come to see our book, Mr. Bennett?”

The old man loved children. Putting out a heavy hand, he patted Robin’s fair curls, and replied, “You’ve hit the nail on the head, sonny. I met Dimsdale yesterday, that drives the mail, and he was telling me how that chap had throwed away his book.”

“Why don’t you go and look at it, sir, and maybe after that,” continued the youthful diplomatist, “you’d just like to hear how it sounds when our Peggy reads it out?”

“That I would,” and the old man rose stiffly from his seat (for he had put in a long day’s work getting in potatoes from a newly broken patch of ground) and then, while Robin acted as showman, he examined the book inside and outside, felt its weight, studied its title, and its frontispiece, and gave it as his deliberate opinion that “Anyone as would fling away such a grand book as that must be rolling in money or gone foolish.”

“The man gave it to Peggy and me for a keepsake,” explained Robin. “Shall I tell you what those gold letters are,—T-A-L-I-S-M-A-N? They mean a kind of charm, father says, and now, Peggy, you begin, for the sound of it is best of all.”

“Kenneth the Scot,” began the reader again, as soon as the visitor had subsided into his seat in the warmest corner.

Once again she was interrupted. “I’d heard tell it was about a Scotchman,” remarked Bennett, “And I’ve a liking for the Scotch (being a bit of a Scot myself on my mother’s side); but now, you go on, my girl.”

Peggy made another start, getting with triumphant rapidity through the page she had been studying while Robin attended to old Stephen, then she settled to a steady pace and gave her entranced audience the story of Kenneth’s adventures in the mysterious chapel in the rock, lighted (how rich it sounded!) with silver lamps; of his recognition, in a slender white-veiled figure, of his lady-love; and of the startling apparition of the two ugly dwarfs.

Through it all, Stephen sat with his eyes fixed upon the reader and, when at her mother’s bidding she closed the book, he left with a brief, “Thanks, Peggy. I’ve never heard the like of that before. Good-night all.”

“We should have asked him to come again,” said Mr. Lydgate. “I was thinking so much of the story, I suppose I forgot.”

But Stephen did not wait for an invitation. Next night he brought his wife. The following night there were four visitors to see the book and hear Peggy read, and for a few days there was much talk about “The Talisman”, in all the lonely houses for miles round. Old Stephen came every evening till the book was finished, but not, alas, the story. In those days most novels made their first appearance in three volumes, and the famous “keepsake” consisted of one volume only.

There was woe in the hearts and on the faces of Peggy’s audience, when they realized that they might never know whether the sick king, Richard the Lionheart, lived or died after drinking the water in which the Arab physician, sent by his enemy, the Soldan, had immersed the Talisman. The children were intensely anxious as to Richard’s fate, whilst their father was equally disappointed on more general grounds at the sudden cessation of the readings. The fact was that Peggy had not realized the significance of that “Vol. I” on the cover.

“Are you very sad that we have only got half a book,” she asked on the first evening when there was nothing new to read. “I want to go on with the story so badly that I could just cry. If we had never begun it, we shouldn’t know what we had missed.”

“If I had always been blind, I should not know what I miss, but, Peggy, I would choose the fuller life even at the cost of a little more pain.”

Peggy put her arm round his neck, “Dear father, somehow I seem to know you so much better since the book came. You have told us such lots of things, yet you must have known them for years.”

“Peggy, your ‘Talisman’ has helped me to think again many long-forgotten thoughts. Yes, and to see that I’ve been very selfish in my darkness.”

“Isn’t it wonderful what a book can do?” said Peggy.

“The poet Cowper says:

“Say that again, father. ‘Books are not seldom talismans and spells?’—it sounds as if he were talking about our ‘Talisman’.”

“No, the poem was written long before Scott’s story. Cowper was saying just then that books are sometimes a power for harm and that knowledge (from books) is not really the same thing as wisdom. He liked to learn from rivulets and trees and flowers and lambs and squirrels. Here is another bit of his that I remember, Peggy—

Peggy, I don’t feel it so dark when Cowper or Scott or you remind me that there is beauty all around me still, even if I cannot see it.”

“But father, why should he talk as if the people that care for books are unthinking?” asked Peggy with a touch of indignation.

Lydgate smiled at her earnestness. “Listen again. He doesn’t quite say that—” and he repeated the three lines very slowly.

“I see, father. I suppose he means that books are so wonderful that if you yourself don’t think, you may let them go and make you do things whether you ought to or not.”

“That’s something like it, little woman. Choose your books as you would your friends.”

“Father, how funny! There doesn’t seem much chance for us to choose books. I wonder whether Mr. Cowper had many?”

“At least he was not starved for them as we have been.”

“Starved, father? I did not know you wanted books so dreadfully as that. Wasn’t it a wonderful, wonderful thing how this one came? If Robin had not wanted so very much to see the coach we should not have had it.”

“If some one had not been willing to put herself out to give Robin pleasure, she would not have had the opportunity to give this much greater thing to all of us and to Steve and Mrs. Bennett.”

“Oh, father, do you really think that?”

“Yes, Peggy darling, and, what’s more, I believe your ‘Talisman’ is only beginning its work.”

WANTED—VOLUME TWO!

It was a snowy morning early in October. There was a roaring fire in the big kitchen of the Blue Boar Tavern on Dundas Street and here, much at their ease, two or three men awaited the arrival of the mail from Toronto.

Amongst the group was old Stephen Bennett, who having brought down a load of potatoes for the master of the house, was mightily enjoying the comfort of the warm kitchen and the opportunity for conversation. He lay back in an ancient split-bottomed chair, gazing dreamily at the smoked hams, festoons of dried apples and bunches of herbs which dangled from the rafters. At last he burst out with a chuckle, “What a story that man Scott could have made about Canada. Now this here kitchen, he’d have made a sort of picture of it—the blazing fire, them hams and things and you fellows and me meeting same as the Scotch knight and the Arabian met in the hermit’s cave.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Jonas Tobin, a gossipy little man, who went from house to house, making up the home-tanned leather of the settlers into shoes, and acting (incidentally) as chief news-carrier of the district. “Sure, Steve, you must be dreaming with your hermits and caves—”

“Dreaming? No, indeed. It’s all in a grand book that Peggy Lydgate has been reading out to her folk and my missis and me.”

“Peggy Lydgate? and when did she learn to read,” put in the saucy little maid, who was setting the table. “She’s never been to school for more than a day or two in her life, so far as I know.”

“My dear, none of us know everything,” retorted Steve. “Peggy’s a fine reader anyhow, but give me a chance, Sukey, and I’ll tell you about this same book.”

“Oh, I know all about the book. It’s bound in green with gold letters and it’s called ‘The Talisman’, and it’s full of strange stuff no one can believe.”

The old man turned in search of a more sympathetic listener. “It was just about a miracle, Jonas, the way them children got that book.”

“So it was! So it was!”

“Then you’ve heard about it too? By what Robin said the fellow was drunk and seeing them in the Twin Oaks—a-watching for the coach to go by—took a shy at them with the first thing handy, which happened to be the book.”

“You haven’t got the story straight, Steve,” corrected the shoemaker condescendingly. “Though there’s one thing I would like to know. What is it all about?”

“The book?—it’s about a king called Richard and his lady the Queen and some kind of a magic cure-all and my Lord This and Sir Somebody That—”

“Not Sir Francis Bond Head?” jeered Tobin, rolling out the name of the recently appointed and not very popular Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada with a grimace.

“No, no, man.” Bennett spoke impatiently. “By what Lesley Lydgate said to Jim (he’s a terror to ask questions) it all happened hundreds of years ago in one of them Bible countries, and the fight was to get back Jerusalem from a lot of heathen Turks who had got a hold on it. It’s a great book, but it has a way with it as if kings and lords were of different flesh and blood to fellows like you and me, Tobin.”

“That’s it. That’s what made Mackenzie so hopping mad, and some say”—Tobin was fond of this non-committal expression—“it was that queer Englishman Crane that Mackenzie was fighting over it. But Dimsdale will know sure. Here’s the mail now. I do like to get right down to the bottom of things.”

Steve chuckled. “True for you, Jonas. There isn’t your beat in Halton County for diving and ferreting to the bottom of things.”

But by this time Jonas was up and out of the door, pushing his way through the passengers who had alighted from the coach (looking like so many bears in their shaggy fur coats) to waylay Dimsdale.

“Tut, tut, man, d’ye think I keep a list in my head of all the passengers I carry up and down?” retorted the dignitary of the box seat. “Maybe it was Mackenzie and maybe it wasn’t.”

“I’d a thought you’d have known him by sight at least.”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but if a passenger chooses to lighten his luggage, that’s none of my business, nor yours either, Tobin.”

But when everybody was seated round the table, Steve awoke much sympathy for the Lydgate family in that the youngsters had only got half Sir Walter Scott’s story after all; and he told how his blind friend longed for books and for a school where his children, big and little, could learn at least to read and write.

Half-a-dozen people made suggestions. “There are two bookshops in Toronto now,” said one, “Mackenzie’s and another.”

“A pretty penny they would have to pay for it,” said Steve. “The Lydgates have no more spare cash than the rest of us farmers. They can’t buy books, that I know.”

“Why shouldn’t they borrow it?” observed a stout, good-natured lady.

“Who would lend it?” objected a gloomy individual, whose dress, manner and accent proclaimed him a recent arrival from England, and who was indeed the Mr. Crane referred to by Tobin, earlier in the morning, as “queer”.

“Books are not necessaries of life,” said a severe woman in a black hood and cloak. “I dare say those young people are the better for not having opportunity to waste their time over works of fiction.”

But the good-natured lady had another idea. “Let us make a collection and try to get the book in Toronto. I can’t bear to think of that poor blind father having nothing to occupy his mind.”

“Oh, ma’am, he’s always busy,” replied Steve, “and I doubt they’d blame me for talking too fast, if you took up that collection. Thank you kindly, ma’am, all the same. Never fear, Peggy’ll get the book somehow, sooner or later, then we’ll have the happy time. She’ll get it, if it’s anywhere in Upper Canada.”

Dimsdale had just set his unwieldy vehicle in motion, after dinner, when he recognized the girl about whose affairs there had been so much discussion, approaching the Blue Boar, and he pulled up his impatient team to shout, “Peggy Lydgate, about that there Volume Two—maybe you don’t know that there are a couple of book shops in Toronto now and one of them is run by Mackenzie, the fellow who gave you Volume One. Perhaps he’d fix it so that you could have the others.”

Peggy thanked the man with enthusiasm and looked so happy that he said to the melancholy passenger beside him, “Yon’s a bright girl—never seen the inside of a school but reads like a parson, Steve Bennett says, and he ought to know, for bad as he is with rheumatics, he’s been trudging up to Lydgate’s every night for more than a week just to hear her read. And he’s as taken up with the story as if he was a boy. You should hear him holding forth about Kenneth the Scot and King Richard Lionheart and something he calls a talisman—a bit of stone in a fancy bag, I think he said, that cured people of fevers and what not.”

“Pity we haven’t a talisman here, that would cure folk of the fevers and agues they get in these parts,” remarked the depressed man, with a sudden awakening of interest. “Who is the girl? and where does she live?”

“She’s Lesley Lydgate’s daughter. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? His house went on fire when the children were all young and somehow he got a hurt to his eyes, trying to save the youngsters and his books and stuff. It left him stone blind, poor fellow, and him a good scholar. Leastways, Steve says he talks about the things in that book as good as the book itself. It’s lucky his wife’s a fine practical woman, or they’d never have pulled through. They are a nice lot of children too, but, if you’ll believe me, it’s just Peggy, the only girl of the lot, that can read or write her name. Not that I blame ’em—the schools are that scattered and half of them have no sort of teachers. I’m glad my two are getting their chance in Toronto; but it’s been a shame in the country.”

“It is a shame,” said the sad-faced man. “There ought to be some system of education.”

“Well, there’s the beginnings of a system”—Dimsdale was not going to let this new-comer abuse Canada, even if he chose to do it himself. “It’s coming, my man, it’s coming; but I tell you people like you and Mr. Lydgate that have had their chances in the Old Country are the ones that should help it along and not sit back and laugh when members of Parliament, that can’t read too good themselves, make laws to have schools. Who else should do it, I’d like to know. At least they’ve got a good notion, like me, how awkward it is to be a poor hand at reading and writing.”

“How do you know that we’ve had chances?” asked the passenger, stroking his chin.

“How do I know? Do you think I’ve been driving this coach for well nigh ten years without getting some insight into human natur’ as well as horse natur’? I know you’ve had your chances of book-learning by your looks and your ways and your talk.”

“Of what use is book-learning in a country where there are no books and no time to read them and no money to buy them?”

“Two weeks ago I might have asked the same fool question,” said Dimsdale severely, “but if you’d heard old Stephen all worked up like, and bubbling over with his old kings and fiery, hot deserts and talisman cures you’d have seen, as I did, that a bit of book-learning would change this country for lots of folk from a kind of prison to a good enough place to live in. After all, it’s in your mind whether you’re contented or not.”

“Would you say the same, if you happened to know a man and two women who had the bit of book-learning and hated the country all the more—at least two of them do—because every book they read reminds them of the dear old land.”

The mail-driver looked sharply at the speaker. “I’d say them sort wasn’t properly broke to harness. Maybe they’ll do well enough in a few years’ time, if they don’t shut themselves up to themselves too tight. Steady, Diamond, steady, that old stump’s nothing to shy at for an educated horse like you.”

The man of gloom sat silent till within sight of his getting-off place, then, he said hurriedly, “Where does that reading girl live? I like her looks, and—we have a book or two.”

“Well now, don’t things fit in lovely sometimes? She lives on the second concession north of Dundas Street. There’s a bridle-path just west of the bridge yonder and it runs straight up to Lydgate’s. Times when you can cross the Creek, they must be your near neighbours, (you bought the old Low place, didn’t you, last October, a couple of months after you landed?) but I’d advise you to stick to the bridge till the winter settles in. Remember, first trail west of the Creek. You can’t miss your way.”

“You don’t know how clever I am at missing my way in these woods,” said the melancholy man with a gleam of humour in his eyes.

“Is that so? Then suppose you leave it to me, and I’ll get word somehow to Peggy that she’s to go up to James Crane’s (that’s right, isn’t it?) first chance she gets. Here’s where you get off, sir. Good-day, and thank you.”

Pete was as good as his word. He watched for an opportunity of sending Mr. Crane’s message to Peggy, and at length, falling in again with Stephen Bennett, arranged with him to “step up, and tell Peggy that that there Englishman, James Crane, who’d bought out old Mrs. Low, wanted to see her right away, and he thought maybe it was something about a book.”

EVERY INCH A LADY.

Unfortunately every one for fifteen miles round knew the Cranes by reputation, as “proud stuck-up English people, who thought themselves too good to have anything to do with their neighbours.” When they drove down to the store, they never, so it was said, found anything to their taste. They kept away from all social gatherings and though they attended the occasional services, Mr. and Miss Crane at least hardly found a word to say to anyone. To do Mrs. Crane, the third member of the family, justice it was commonly said that she was “only a Crane by marriage and did seem a bit more friendly-like.”

Peggy had seen the three at church and had wondered at Mrs. Crane’s long gold chain and at Miss Crane’s slim white hands, but at the thought of going to their house, her heart sank, only not into her boots because from motives of economy she happened to be barefoot. Whilst the rest discussed and suggested, Peggy mentally reviewed her wardrobe and was more dissatisfied than ever before with her Sunday clothes when she thought of the critical eyes of “those Cranes”. The idea positively turned her cold.

At last she plucked up all her courage and announced in a “do-or-die” tone that she would start bright and early in the morning. If she had not had her best garments to consider, she might have shortened her journey by crossing the swollen creek. But it was clearly impossible to beard these strange lions in their den in anything except her best, and the book she must have, if toil or sacrifice could obtain it, for her father’s sake.

Immediately on the announcement of her decision, the family threw itself into the task of getting her ready. While John emulated Tobin by putting a very perceptible patch on one of her stout leather shoes, Mrs. Lydgate explored an old cowhide trunk which contained the very few family treasures, and in the morning helped the girl to dress as if, said Robin, she was going to her wedding. Nevertheless the dressing took a very long time; but, when she at last appeared in her Sunday gown of grey homespun, with a gay cashmere shawl over her shoulders (an heirloom in her mother’s family, having been brought from the East by her sea-going grandfather) and a crimson satin hood (another heirloom) rather too small for her, perched jauntily on the back of her head, its vivid colour setting off the darkness of her hair and eyes, there was a general cry of admiration.

Everyone turned out to see her off, and very proud they were of her as she marched away, carrying her shoes in one hand and a bit of lunch, tied up in a checked handkerchief, in the other—the last a precaution against the Cranes possible ignorance of pioneer etiquette, which permitted no visitor to escape from a house unfed.

Peggy’s dismay regarding the adventure was no less than on the previous night; but she made a gallant effort to appear unconcerned, calling with a pretence of gaiety, “Good-bye, all, don’t you wish you were coming too!”

“Good-bye, Peggy. I wish you were not going alone,” cried her father.

“That’s half the fun, father. I’m on a pilgrimage, like Kenneth the Scot, and if I don’t bring back the book, I’ll surely have a great story of adventure to tell you.”

And to convince her father of her cheerfulness, she began to sing to a somewhat aggressive tune, one of the Loyalist songs she had learned from her mother—a song which had come from New York at the same time as the shawl and hood—

The effort to cheer the others raised her own spirits, and she decided that it was nonsense to be afraid of any one who was English. Besides she was not going uninvited.

Peggy held her head high, except where the branches swung low across the path; and she would have made good progress only it was such an exhilarating October morning that it was impossible to hurry. Sometimes her way lay beneath the maples, glorious in their autumn dress, and she had to stop to look up through their lightly quivering gold and scarlet to the deep blue overhead. Sometimes a saucy squirrel raged and scolded as if forbidding her passage through his territory. And once she lingered for many minutes watching a sleek muskrat intent on some mysterious business in a little pool.

Reaching Dundas Street she rested for a moment under the Twin Oaks. She loitered again on the bridge over the Sixteen Mile Creek, to gaze down into the dun waters and dream of the lake and the ocean towards which they were hurrying. She loved the bridge and the creek and the thoughts belonging to them. Suddenly she realized that the sun had climbed high into the heavens and, fearing lest the short autumn day should prove too brief for her great adventure, she was beginning to run, when she heard the brisk beat of a horse’s hoofs on the road behind her. Of course she glanced to see whether the rider was neighbour or stranger. Satisfied on that point she went demurely up the rise till the horseman, overtaking her, jumped from his steed, saying gaily, “Why Peggy, you are so grand, I hardly knew you. Is it a wedding or a preaching or a christening?”

“None of the three, Frank. I’m going to borrow a book (I hope) from Mr. James Crane,” and Peggy’s dark eyes sparkled under the hood.

“Good luck to you. He’ll never be able to say you ‘Nay!’ You are gorgeous this morning, Peggy. Wherever did you get that wonderful shawl?”

“It’s one my great-grandfather brought from the East, years and years ago, when the States were British. But, Frank, you know about nice people’s ways.” (Peggy’s voice had an anxious note) “Is it too strange a mixture to wear these things with my homespun gown?”

The combination was incongruous, and Frank knew it. He hesitated. Peggy looked down at her bare feet, and said with an uneasy little laugh, “It makes me think of the minister’s last sermon—about the image that had feet of clay.”

“Why should you have feet of clay?” questioned the boy, not looking at her, as he ventured on the hint he had longed many a time to give. “Why do you so hate shoes, Peggy?”

“Shoes cost money. I don’t hate them; I just love them too much to drag them about in the mud and, having grown up barefoot, my feet don’t fit into shoes as if I were a nice proper fine lady.”

“You mustn’t say that, Peggy.” Frank sounded a little annoyed. “You are and you ought to be every inch a lady.”

“Only I don’t look it,” laughed Peggy. “Well, Frank, I can promise this, if I ever get the chance of going to Toronto, I’ll not disgrace my friends by running barefoot.”

“That’s a promise, Peggy.”

“Yes,” and she sighed. “I must say I don’t envy you your shoes nor your having always to live up to grand city ways; but I do envy you your horse.”

“Beauty is a good horse and she knows as much as many Christians,” exclaimed Frank enthusiastically. “Wouldn’t you like a ride on her, Peggy?”

“I never have been on a horse’s back,” replied the girl, stopping short.

“Then I’ll put you up. It’s not the right kind of a saddle for a lady, but I’m not afraid that you’ll fall. Beauty is a gentle creature.”

“How high up it feels. I never knew a horse was so tall before,” exclaimed Peggy, gay as a child, softly patting Beauty’s neck and laughing down, in sheer lightness of heart, at the young man who walked beside her.

So they went along the sunlit forest road, and a traveller, meeting them, carried on his journey a long-enduring picture of the handsome girl in her red hood and brilliant shawl, with her youthful cavalier beside her. The ride lasted but fifteen minutes, for Peggy would not have Frank turn out of his way on her account, but she sighed again when she was left alone, inspected her mud-stained feet with vague dissatisfaction, and wished she really was “every inch a lady”—since some people seemed to think it of so much importance.

It still wanted an hour of noon, when she came to the track leading in to the Low place, but before entering on the last lap of her journey, she perched on a stump and lunched with an appetite on salt-rising bread and deer meat.

Thus fortified for the ordeal before her, she plunged into the bush road, which went on and on, before there was any sign of a human habitation. Just here the wood consisted almost entirely of sombre pines, and even to Peggy, forest-born as she was, it seemed dark and forbidding. She was glad when at last she caught sight of a bit of roof through the trees. A few steps onward brought her into full view of the rather spread-abroad log house, which had been added to so often that it looked like two or three houses instead of one. A very recent addition was a large bay-window. Peggy had heard of it, but the sight of it revived her nervous dislike for her errand, perhaps because the incongruous adjunct to poor old Low’s venerable dwelling was regarded by many critics as irrefutable evidence of the pride of the Cranes. After one glance, Peggy retreated to the shade of the thicker trees, put on her stockings and shoes and rearranged her hair, hood and shawl, using a little pool at the roots of a tall pine first for a wash-basin, then for a looking-glass.

Her toilet completed, Peggy went soberly across the bit of garden ground towards the low door of the rambling house, and then she noticed an odd thing—odd at least in the bush, where all kinds of woven stuff was precious and costly. The windows, even those in the gable end of the upper half-storey, were curtained with green, and every curtain was drawn.

It gave Peggy the sort of thrill that the fairy-tale Prince must have had when he approached the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. Peggy had heard about her from her mother, and was sure that famous palace could hardly have been so dead-alive as this strange old house in the woods. Those sage-green curtains stood to Peggy for a challenge; but they disappointed her too. Suppose no one was at home! Suppose she had had her long walk for nothing! Well, not quite for nothing, there had been Frank and her ride on Beauty. And Peggy laughed instead of continuing to suppose; sprang impetuously forward and rapped with the unrestrained strength of an arm that could wield a hoe or swing an axe “with anybody”. Yet she fondly imagined she was rapping gently!

No answer from the spell-bound creature within, if indeed there was any one within; and Peggy’s disappointment rapidly got the better of her sense of adventure.

THE HOUSE-BREAKER.

Peggy was distinctly a “try-try-again” sort of person. She rapped at that door with variations, gently, loudly, seductively, violently. Occasionally she fancied she heard slight movements within; again she was convinced the house was empty. Wearied with her unavailing efforts, she sat down to consider, glanced up at the sun, decided it was almost noon, and calculated rapidly that she could sit on that doorstep for three hours and a half and still reach home before it was too dark. But she knew that she would be very hungry and cold and tired before half three hours had passed, and, very unreasonably she felt annoyed that “those queer Cranes”, said “never to go anywhere”, should have chosen to go off on this day of all days.

She turned from the study of the sun to study of that extraordinary bay-window. Why had they made it so big? and of such a shape? What a fortune it must have cost in glass! Surely they must be rolling in money. She rose, thinking to count the panes in the four windows composing the bay, with some dim intention of reckoning the cost, though she was well aware, alas, that her arithmetic might prove unequal to “doing such a sum in her head”. She was counting the panes in the first sash, when she thought she saw one of the dull curtains tremble.

She shrank back a little, staring hard. Again the curtains trembled, stirred, opened by the merest crack. That was enough for Peggy. Some one was at home. She picked up a stick and belaboured the door with all her force, convinced that the mysterious inmate was hard of hearing.

No answer, but Peggy would not admit defeat. She performed another tattoo at the front entrance, then ran round to the back, to hear, unmistakably, some one barring the door of the lean-to.

The shed was old and ill-built, and from its crevices poured forth a cloud of steam, of an evil smell, with which, however, Peggy had some vague association.

But she did not stop to think about it. She rained a hurricane of blows on the back door, and at last won the response of something between a shriek and a groan. On this she jumped to the conclusion that one of the Crane ladies must be alone and terrified. Again she took a few moments for consideration, and it occurred to her that it might be re-assuring to proclaim aloud her name and errand. Accordingly she cried out in a voice that would have done credit to a town-crier, “Don’t be afraid. It is just Peggy Lydgate. Mr. Crane sent word to me to come.”

A pause. The timorous one within remained secluded.

Peggy was seized with an inspiration. After a decent interval she began to sing her Loyalist song loud and clear, convinced that that must re-assure even the least brave of English women.

She reckoned without her host. The song had a certain result. It disabused the lady within of the notion, due to a very inadequate glimpse of Peggy’s dark locks and gay trappings that the would-be intruder was “an Indian savage”, but it also convinced her that the singer must be out of her mind, a conviction that deepened as the girl began to perambulate, like a Highland piper, from one door to the other, chanting vigorously such seemingly malapropos sentiments as

Her song concluded, Peggy with scarcely a pause began again to beat on the door. She was becoming annoyed at such suspicious treatment, though even now she was perfectly innocent of any intention other than to make known, in a civil and conventional manner, her desire for admittance.

It was a contest of obstinacy with terror, cut short at last by the giving way of the door, so suddenly that Peggy fell over it into the middle of the room. As she fell, she heard a shriek of dismay and a wild scuttering and, too paralyzed by the sense of the enormity of her behaviour to pick herself up, sat on the floor staring with wide-open eyes at the tall thin figure that had taken refuge on the far side of a great iron stove and was brandishing a huge ladle with the evident intention of using it as a weapon.

Happily Peggy did not attempt to storm the breach she had made. She did not even attempt to rise, but exclaimed dolefully, “Oh dear! I am afraid I have broken your door!”

It was too true. There was a long pause, and Peggy was still gazing woefully at the broken hinges when a constrained, rather prim, voice propounded these two questions—First, “Have I the pleasure of seeing Miss Lydgate?” Secondly, “Have you ever made soft soap?”

“Have I ever made soft soap?” said Peggy, coming to herself and getting up all the more briskly because she feared that she might ruin her good clothes with the overflow from the buckets of lye. “Yes, I have helped to make it many a time.” Now that her wits were about her she perceived that the kitchen, or whatever it was, was pervaded with the said soap in all stages of its composition. To balance the pails of lye on the floor there were mounds of fat on the table, but to Peggy’s practised eye the unsatisfactory-looking messes of a yellowish brown substance that stood here and there in other receptacles might be supposed to be soap but were not.

“Why does it not get thick as we were told it would?” again came the querulous voice out of the mist.

“Perhaps you have not boiled it long enough, or perhaps you have boiled it too much; or maybe your lye is not strong enough, or perhaps you’ve put in too much fat,” was Peggy’s prompt but not very illuminating answer. “Let me see.”

Seizing the ladle, she dipped up a small portion of the simmering mass, took it to the door, examined it carefully, and finally, to the horror of the soap manufacturer, dipped her finger into the stuff and touched it with the tip of her little red tongue.

With solemnity she gave her verdict. “It ought to be sharp enough to bite your tongue or the grease will just cake, I am afraid. The lye can’t have been strong enough.”

Upon this discouraging report, the tall thin lady suddenly collapsed on a bench behind the stove and her tears began to fall like rain. Peggy tried to comfort her. “Of course I don’t know about soap as well as mother does. Perhaps she could fix it up for you even yet.”

“Oh, oh, it’s not just the soap,” sobbed the other. “It’s everything. It’s the smell and the mess and the muddle and all the trees and the awful roads and this miserable country. Poor Milly, she’ll be home in an hour, if they don’t get stuck in the mud, and I—I haven’t begun to get anything to eat yet. There’s no bread, but I meant to surprise them by making the soap before they came home. Now it’s no use and I’m so tired I can hardly stand. There’s everything to do.”

“Cheer up, Miss Crane, we’ll soon have things nice,” said Peggy, looking for a spot, free from the destructive lye, upon which to lay her shawl. At length perceiving an open door she ventured to pass through it. The room she entered fairly took her breath with its riches, dimly seen in the gloom caused by the green curtains. Opposite her was a set of shelves on which were ranged more books than she had ever before seen together, perhaps fifty or even a hundred. She laid her hood and shawl on a chair, half crossed the room to see if the beloved “Talisman” was among those tempting volumes, changed her mind and turned back to the sloppy kitchen, where her hostess still showed signs of verging on hysterics. The books must wait!

“Miss Crane,” she said very distinctly, “you can’t do anything more with that soap to-day, so I’ll take the lye outside, and put the fat in this big pan and cover it up with this other one.” Peggy was doing these things while she mentioned them. “Now if you’ll give me a hand, we’ll take that big kettle out of the way, and I’ll fix up the door. Please lend me a hammer and two or three nails and a bit of rope or old leather. After that what should you say to our making biscuit, as there’s no bread for your supper?”

Miss Crane dried her eyes and meekly did the strange girl’s bidding, holding the hammer till it was wanted as she did for Mr. Crane, and looking on with astonishment, whilst Peggy contrived rude substitutes for hinges out of a few inches of old strap, whisked pails and kettles out of sight, made up the fire (with secret joy because it was the first time she had ministered to the needs of a real cook-stove), went to the spring for water, set it on to boil and then went down on hands and knees to wipe the floor. The result was that Miss Crane felt that she and her concerns were in the grip of a kind, capable, meddlesome whirlwind.

But as the visitor evolved a kind of rough-and-ready order out of the chaos, the English girl (she had not yet come of age) grew less limp, like a very thirsty plant, as Peggy told her people afterwards, “which perks up when you water it”, but Peggy had no notion how terribly thirsty Miss Crane had been for a bit of neighbourly kindness.

At the biscuit stage of the performance, however, she tacitly asserted her right, as “the elder woman and the hostess”, to take command. She insisted that Peggy must rest, while she measured flour and fussed over the biscuits, destined, as her experienced guest could have told her, to prove very solid food indeed.

Peggy’s enjoyment of the oddity of the situation was dashed by her impatience to get back to the books. At last, while the biscuits were still far from completion, she obtained permission to attack the potatoes, and took off their coats so rapidly that Miss Crane came to a complete standstill to admire and commend. “You certainly are a quick worker!” she said.

“I have to be,” explained Peggy. “There are nine of us in the family and I am the only girl.” She gave a little self-conscious laugh, “Queer, isn’t it?—Father says I’m a bit of a tomboy, and I do like splitting rails or burning brush better than spinning or sewing. Why couldn’t I be a nice, neat, prettily-behaved girl, when there’s only one of me, and so many boys? Aren’t things odd in life?”

“Very,” replied the young Englishwoman, closing her lips in a straight line and looking, at that moment, as Peggy thought, older than her mother. “You prefer men’s work! One of my quarrels with this country is that all of us, women as well as men, have to do every kind of rough work. Really it seems to me there’s no time for women to be womanly.”

Peggy asked one of her disconcertingly direct questions. “What do you mean by being womanly? You see, father went blind when we were burnt out soon after my youngest brother was born—oh, you should see Robin, Miss Crane, he’s such a droll little darling—and mother had to do the man’s work. Not but what John was just splendid, but he was only a young boy. At first father had bad turns with his head, but whenever he could get up he took hold and managed to do all kinds of things in the house—knitting and dish-washing and cooking—that you’d think no one could do without seeing.”

“Tell me more about your father and mother?”

And Peggy pictured in her vivid fashion the hardships faced so bravely, and her new friend grew ashamed of her tears over such a paltry affliction as a kettle of soap that would not come right. She did not say so however. When the potatoes were ready and the biscuits were beginning to take shape, Miss Crane, who in England had been a governess in a “Select Academy for Young Ladies”, said in her stiff way, “Pardon a seemingly indiscreet question, but what was your special reason, Miss Lydgate (I must assume that you had a special reason) for calling here to-day?”

“I’m just Peggy, ma’am. It was this way”—and she told the story of the keepsake, that wonderful treasure, that yet was only half a book.

“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Crane; and it was an “Oh” full of intelligence and something like remorse. “I must apologize, Peggy, if I may call you so, for my seeming inhospitality this afternoon. My brother had told us you might come, but when you knocked I did not connect you with the circumstances—and—and—” Miss Crane hesitated, then explained in a rush, as though she wanted to get it over, “I fear I have not the necessary courage for life in these woods. (Your mother must be a heroine.) I heard you knock,” (Peggy nodded), “and tried to see who you were, before opening the door, without exposing myself to view. I could see only a bit of your pretty crimson hood and your shawl—and I judged it wise not to open the door.”

Peggy nodded again. “Perhaps you thought I was an Indian?”

Miss Crane could make no denial.

“What a joke! An Indian, in the hood and shawl that my great-grandfather gave to my great-grandmother on her wedding day! She was a tremendous Loyalist, mother says. Besides, none of the Indians in these parts ever do any harm. I wouldn’t have come in these things, if I’d had anything nice of my own. If I’d worn my old cloak you’d have thought me something dreadful. You and your sister have such beautiful clothes.”

“We have nothing to compare with that wonderful shawl of yours. It’s the loveliest bit of colour I’ve seen since we left England.”

“I like it myself,” admitted Peggy. “It’s rather like our woods just now, isn’t it? But I am wondering,” she went on roguishly, “what you thought I was when I began to sing. Crazy?”

Miss Crane laughed outright for the first time—a good, hearty, really girlish laugh, in which Peggy joined without quite knowing why. “Crazy? Well, a little perhaps, because where I come from, it isn’t exactly usual for callers to sing a war-song if your knocker happens to be out of order.”

“What do they do?”

“Go away, I suppose.”

“Would they, if they’d walked three miles to see you about something very particular?”

“Perhaps not.”

“And you call that a war-song? Certainly the Loyalists were great fighters; and, oh, I must tell mother you thought me crazy when I sang it! If you want to tease mother just make a bit of a joke about Loyalists.”

“What are ‘Loyalists’?” asked Miss Crane, but before Peggy found breath to answer this astounding question, she went on, “If you had been the one inside and had heard all that about Englishmen fighting and I don’t know what else, at every door and window of your house in succession, you would have been startled.”

“I might,” said Peggy, with a shamefaced chuckle, “and yet I was just trying to make you understand that we are English like yourself.”

“And it was worst of all, when you gave up singing and began to break in the door.”

“Oh, Miss Crane, I didn’t mean to break it. I was only knocking. Do forgive me. What will your brother say, and when he had asked me to come? May I tell you why I kept at it so? I was sure he meant to lend us a book—Father is fairly hungry for books—and we hoped it might even be ‘The Talisman’ itself.”

“We will go and see the books”; and Miss Crane led the way into the parlour and let in a flood of sunlight through what Peggy henceforth thought of as “that grand window”. She stood entranced with the richness and colour of the carpet, the china ornaments, the sofa-pillows worked in cross-stitch, the two or three pictures gleaming against the wooden walls in frames of gold. But above all, there were the books—three rows of them, some in gorgeous covers, some dingy and well-worn.

“I think you will find ‘The Talisman’ amongst them, but please be careful,” spoke the prim, delicately modulated voice at her ear, “Our books are very precious treasures!”

Peggy cast an awestruck glance at the speaker, and moved forward like one in a dream, but in a flash was dancing and clapping her hands, for there in the middle row, in all its majesty of green and gold, stood Volume Two!

“Take it down,” said Miss Crane.

And Peggy, after vigorously (but impolitely) rubbing her hands on her skirt, with some reference to soft soap, took out Volume Two and sat down on the floor to open it with reverential awe.

Regardless of misplaced soap on her own attire, Miss Crane sat down too, assuming a proper ladylike attitude in a straight-backed chair; but, though the mere sight of a girl tended to make her behaviour consciously exemplary, she was perfectly fascinated with her visitor, in her queer humped-up posture on the carpet, laughing, murmuring over the words as she read, but turning the pages with an eagerness never displayed by any of the “select” young ladies, whose “deportment” had been her anxious care in that other life across the ocean.

She did not understand Peggy, with her contradictory roughness and fineness; her limited experience and her free, untrammelled ways; but, for the first time since she “had been buried in the woods”, as she phrased it, Ellen Crane wondered whether, after all, there might not be something worth while in this wild life.

THE BLUNDERBUSS.

It was about four o’clock when Peggy started for home, with the precious book tied up securely in the checked handkerchief. It seemed so unbelievably delightful that she danced across the little clearing before the “Low” house; but, turning to wave “good-bye” before she plunged into the woodland track, she was struck with pity at the despondent, willowy figure in the door.

She darted back, exclaiming, “I can’t leave you alone, Miss Crane.”

The limp figure stiffened to astonishing rigidity. “Go, Peggy, this very minute,” was the stern reply. “It would be very wrong for a young girl like you to be wandering in this awful wilderness alone at night.”

“But you’re so frightened,” protested Peggy, “I can’t leave you. You see I’m used to the woods and you’re not.”

“I must get used to them. Go, Peggy,” was the heroic command.

And, as the girl said afterwards, “What can you do with a woman like that?” What she did do was a thing amazing to the discouraged new-comer. She caught her round the neck and kissed her, exclaiming “You poor dear, I do hate to leave you alone.”

But she was not gone yet. She had just recrossed the clearing when she was alarmed by a sudden clamour of hoots and cries which came, she guessed, from the old neglected farm, known variously as the Old Court, the Saxby Place or the Haunted House, situated in the next concession to the north.

Peggy did not like the sounds, though she could not guess whether they signified some drunken orgy or one of the excessively stormy political demonstrations which were so common at the time. She felt that in either case it would be cruel to desert the timorous English girl. Though longing to hurry home with her prize and her news, she turned back a second time, for never had she been more convinced that an impulse came of duty’s prompting.

To Peggy duty was a very big thing. She had never led a soft, easy self-indulgent life. She was a pioneer accustomed to hardness, and to fight for what seemed worth while against circumstances or even against herself—and now, almost to her own astonishment, she found her feet walking away with her in the opposite direction from that she desired to take. They were no longer dancing, but another outcry quickened their movements. She fancied that she caught a glimpse of a white face between the green curtains. She had no need to knock this time. The door flew open before she touched it.

“Oh, my poor child, I’ve been so troubled that I let you go,” were Miss Crane’s first words. “What are those dreadful people doing? What are they shouting?”—and Peggy opened her eyes to find that she was returning not in the guise of comforter or protector, but of a terrified refugee.

Miss Crane was far too much upset to wait for answers to her questions. “What can we do, if they try to break in, Peggy?—and oh, suppose they waylay my brother and his wife? But it’s just what he has been expecting. He was saying only yesterday that if he had understood what terrible misrule and confusion and unrest there is in this unhappy country he never would have left dear old England. There, listen to that! Peggy, what shall we do?”

“I don’t think they’ll trouble us;” but in spite of herself the girl’s tone was a little doubtful. “I don’t see why they should come here. There has been a lot of wild talk, especially since the election. Father, who’s English through and through, says that the Governor had no right to do the things he did to get the men he liked into the Assembly, and that it’s no wonder that the Reformers are against the Government. But they can have no grudge against private people.”

“Mr. Crane thinks that we are on the eve of a struggle resembling the American Revolution—and in that the Patriots, so-called, did maltreat the Tories. Moreover as you know very well the people here do not like us.”

“I—I—don’t really know it,” stammered Peggy.

“We do know it,” was the decisive answer, “but we can’t help that now.”

“No. Are you sure the doors are all barred?”

“I don’t think I have missed anything I could fasten.”

Peggy investigated, strengthening the fortifications by wedging a door here and nailing up a shutter there, though Miss Crane was fearful that her hammering might draw unwelcome attention. And there was something terrifying in the hoarse, intermittent roars.

“They are cheering some speaker they like,” explained Peggy. But Miss Crane threw herself on her bed and buried her face in the pillows as if her last hour had come. It began to get on Peggy’s nerves. She listened intently. Was it the wind rattling the ill-fitting doors and shutters? or were marauders trying to find entrance? She told herself that, if a rebellion was really beginning, the men would never waste their time on unimportant people like the Cranes, but it is not easy to scold yourself into common sense, especially if you are a contradictory being like Peggy and half of you persists in meeting the other half’s best arguments with foolish imaginings.

Peggy felt that her sensible side would have had a better chance if Miss Crane had stopped her moaning and groaning—then she laughed out loud at the ridiculous remembrance of how resolutely the poor thing had held the fort against a suspicious visitor earlier in the day. That laugh frightened Miss Crane worse than ever, but it helped Peggy’s sensible side!

The girl jumped up, shook her hostess’s shoulder, and called in her ear, “Get up, ma’am. It’s all right. I’m sure it’s all right. We’re just fancying dangers as you did when you thought I was an Indian! Isn’t there anywhere in this house from which we can see—things?” (Peggy did not mean ghosts, though to herself her words had that suggestion.) “What about the garret?”

“The garret’s full of lumber. You can’t get up. The ladder broke after Milly put up the curtains.”

Even under the pressing sense of danger Peggy had to turn aside to ask, “But why did you put curtains in a lumber room?”

“One has to consider the appearance of the outside of one’s house,” replied Miss Crane, with the impatience of one who answers a self-evident question and has just grace enough not to add “You stupid!”

“Oh—” said Peggy—an emphatic “Oh” of utter astonishment at a standard of respectability not her own.

Then she turned again to the work on hand. “I’m sure I can get up. Let me try. I do want to see what they are doing.”

“The garret is full of lumber,” objected Miss Crane again. Nevertheless she rose and showed her companion the trapdoor and the ladder and found her a candle-lantern and a piece of cord.

That the ladder had lost half its rungs did not trouble Peggy. Ellen gasped at the rapidity of her motions and at the hardihood with which she sat dangling her feet through the square hole in the ceiling.

The watcher was still more astounded when the feet disappeared, and their owner began racketing about overhead amongst the old boxes and ironmongery, dragging ponderous weights and sometimes letting them go with a crash that shook the house. Miss Crane grew indignant under the nerve-racking suspicion that her guest was rummaging, but her attempt to mount the ladder ended in a descent noisy and ungraceful and quite unworthy of the late preceptress of the Misses Jowett’s “Select Academy”.

The thud recalled Peggy to her duty of reporting to the commandant of the garrison, and, as Miss Crane picked herself up, she saw Peggy, leaning head downwards through the square aperture, looking, for all the world, like one of the odd little baby angels contemplating a headlong descent from the solid clouds of some old master. As she lay prone on the floor above, nothing of her was visible save her eager face framed in dusky hair and a small portion of her shoulder and elbows, which suggested the tiny sprouting wings of the conventional cherub. Miss Crane was quite incapable just then of seeing the funny side of the thing, but stared up at Peggy with an expression of the deepest solemnity.

“Don’t be frightened,” urged the absurd apparition. “I’ve been out on the roof. There’s no one near us, though there is a crowd at the Haunted House, awfully excited, some yelling for Mackenzie and some for Sir Francis. But I’m sure that everything will be quite right, if only”—Miss Crane felt rather than saw that Peggy was desperately anxious—“if only they haven’t got whiskey with them. If they have, some of them may turn foolish. But I’ll tell you what we had better do. I’ll come down and help you up the ladder. This is a famous hiding-place. They’ll never find us, for we’ll draw the ladder up after us.”

“What? leave the door locked and my brother and his wife outside? Never!”

“We could listen, and I’d come down and let them in.”

“Oh, no, no. I should never forgive myself if anything happened.”

“All right,” returned Peggy, nodding energetically. “Just wait a minute. There’s something here that may be useful to frighten them with, any way.”

She withdrew her head. A second later, Miss Crane saw something long and dark descending through the trap door.

“Please, Miss Crane, catch hold of it. It’s not very heavy.”

But the ex-teacher fled, protesting, “I don’t know anything about guns. Put it back. James took it up there to be out of harm’s way.”

“Don’t be afraid. It isn’t loaded, but if any one does bother us, it may frighten them away.”

The ancient fire-arm, which old Low had carried in the War of 1812, was too heavy for the slender cord on which it was suspended. It came down with a clatter. Peggy followed it almost as noisily, and Ellen was again retreating to the ostrich-like refuge of her pillows when the sound of shouts and laughter, not far distant, brought her to a standstill.

Peggy crept towards the door and listened intently. “It’s the boys,” she said. “Some will be crossing this way to Dundas Street. May be they are all right.”

“Listen,” said Miss Crane, “What are they shouting?”

“I’m not sure. Down with something—the Compact, I think.”

“My poor, poor brother!” sighed Ellen. “They will surely meet him.”

“They won’t hurt him. Hush, I hear some one coming. I wish we could see. Perhaps I can—from the big window. Whatever you do don’t open the door till I come back.”

But Peggy lost her way amongst the unfamiliar furniture of the darkened room, and was grievously involved when she heard Miss Crane calling in a tremulous high key, “Who’s there? Please—who is there?”

Peggy now tried to find the door, but it proved just as elusive as the window.

“James, James, answer me—is it you?” rang the thin distressed voice.

“Rat-a-tat” on the door again, but not very loud.

“Why doesn’t he answer? What is the matter?” demanded the distracted lady, as Peggy at last stumbled out of the sitting-room and over the old gun.

“Sh!” she whispered. “It must be they. They don’t want to make those fellows hear.”

“I never thought of that,” murmured Miss Crane, working at the clumsy bolts with trembling, ineffective fingers.

Peggy pushed her away gently enough, shot back one rusty bolt, but on second thoughts picked up the gun, and gave it into the unwilling hands of Miss Crane, saying under her breath, “After all, we don’t know who it is.” Peggy got the door open at last, and could scarcely believe her eyes when on the threshold she saw the tall slim figure of her own brother Jim—with his gun on his shoulder, and a well-filled game-bag on his back. She uttered an exclamation of astonishment.

“Hush!” said the lad in his turn, pressing in and promptly closing and securing the door.

“What is going on?” demanded Peggy, but, glancing over her shoulder, was almost paralyzed with amazement at the sight of Miss Crane who, having backed away into the corner, was endeavouring, though her eyes were wild with fright, to strike terror into the intruder by pointing the muzzle of the gun at him. The threat would have been more impressive if the condition of the poor girl’s nerves, and her uncertainty as to the proper way of holding such a deadly weapon had allowed her to take a “steady aim”. As it was, Jim faced the wobbling barrel with a comical air of perplexity that melted into a genial smile—then calmly took possession of what was known in the neighbourhood as “Low’s old blunderbuss”, with the polite remark, “That’s too heavy for you, ma’am. I’ll put it down”.

“Miss Crane, don’t be frightened. It’s my brother, Jim. I expect father sent him to look for me—but we’ll stay with you till Mr. and Mrs. Crane get home.”

“Surely we will,” said the boy. “Peggy’s partly right and partly wrong. I was out after something for to-morrow’s dinner, and just about sunset found I was pretty near this place, and, hearing those fellows making a noise, thought my sister might feel a bit lonesome so came along to see if she had started for home.”

Re-assured by Jim’s arrival, Miss Crane went to put on the kettle for supper, and Jim seized the opportunity to whisper, “There’s trouble brewing, Peggy.”

“Where were they?” asked Peggy.

“The fellows? Just behind here on the Saxby place. There was a hot time. Some were for and some against the Governor, and things will be worse before they are better, for Craig’s treating them to whiskey.”

“What shall we do?” exclaimed poor Miss Crane coming back from the kitchen in a fright at fresh outcries. “Did you see or hear anything of my brother, Mr. Lydgate? Early this morning he went to Oakville, but he should have been back long before this.”

“The roads are heavy,” said the boy. “No need to be anxious yet, ma’am. No doubt he is waiting for moonrise so that Dobbin will be able to pick his way the easier.”

“ON YOUR HONOUR, PEGGY—”

The full moon was high over the tree tops and Mrs. Crane’s little French clock had struck nine before the watchers heard the sound of wheels and cheerful conversation. Miss Crane, who had been looking very limp indeed, sat straight up, listened intently, and sprang to the door, crying, “Here they are at last.”

“Poor Ellen, you must have thought we were lost!” came out of the darkness. “We couldn’t help ourselves. We are so sorry.”

“What kept you?” The questioner was evidently in no mood to be trifled with.

“The leisurely nature of the people and the bad roads,” Mr. Crane explained in a nutshell. Then he turned to Peggy and her brother, “It was a great relief to find you two good Samaritans keeping watch and ward over our poor deserted sister.”

“I don’t know what I should have done without them,” said that lady. “We’ve had a dreadful time. Such frightful noises! I’d give anything, James, to be safe back in old England.”

“I like this country better every day,” said Crane, rubbing his hands.

Peggy was immensely interested to see the three Cranes together, but at this stage of the conversation, Jim politely but firmly declared that his father would be worrying and that they must go. Rather to his surprise, the Cranes acted like true pioneers and urged them to stay all night. Peggy, looking into Mrs. Crane’s kind brown eyes and feeling the warm pressure of her hand, would have been delighted to stay but she wanted even more to live again through that wonderful day’s adventures with the dear people at home.

“Suppose I go back and tell them you are safe,” whispered Jim, quick to read in his sister’s face the signs of conflicting desires.

But Peggy, promising in her impulsive fashion to come again, declared that she was quite able to walk home. “I am tired,” she told Jim, as soon as they were outside, “but there’s such a lot to tell you all. You were a darling to come for me. I should have felt lonely, after all that uproar at the Old Court. The moonlight makes it worse. Anybody could see one a mile away to-night.”

“Not in these woods, where the shadows are so black, and it’s good luck for us in one thing. Those fellows have felled a big tree across the Creek to make a bridge to their meeting, and we can cross it to-night just as easily as by daylight. Aren’t you glad that we shall not have to go all those miles round by Dundas Street?”

“Yes,” said Peggy. “Isn’t it a glorious night?” but she lowered her voice instinctively, for the moonlight raining softly down amongst the myriad black shapes of the forest increased its mystery and the gentle, unceasing motion of the brown leaves and their more visible shadows, stirred by a tiny breeze, added to Peggy’s sense of eeriness. Jim was talking in a hushed breathless fashion as if he felt it too. At last he murmured, “I’ve something to tell you, Peggy. Can you keep a secret?”

“Have I ever failed you yet, Jim? If you can’t trust me, don’t tell it!”

“Don’t be cross, Peggy. I trust you so far that I’d rather share it with you—it’s only partly mine—than with any one else in the world, so long as you understand that I’m telling you—as a secret. Do you want to hear it, on your honour, Peggy?”

“Of course, I always want to hear your secrets, and, on my honour, I’ll keep faith with you.” (In tense moments like this, Scott’s stately phrases tended to influence their mode of expression.) “Will that do?” asked the confiding Peggy, making neither condition nor reservation in her desire to share the promised thrill.

“Hush,” hissed Jim, peering with the air of an anxious conspirator, into a black shadow behind his sister, “Even the woods have ears!”

His manner was abnormally mysterious and he glared so that Peggy developed “chills” and “creeps” in her backbone, and clutching his arm tightly, scurried along the narrow track in violent haste. “A good, ordinary, jolly secret” was much to her liking, but this one seemed positively uncanny, as she hinted.

Jim evidently had no desire to release her from her bargain, though he went diplomatically and rather grandiloquently to work to intensify the thrill. “Peggy, this is something that will make you feel as if you are a living part of one of those old stories like ‘The Talisman’. It is no child’s play; but often to share a burden is to lighten it—”

“Sometimes it doubles it,” put in Peggy.

“—and you may see a straight road through my conflicting duties.”

The girl was puzzled, somewhat dismayed, not a little flattered, but dimly alive to the fact that her brother must ultimately accept the responsibility for his own actions. “Whether you tell me or not, Jim, it seems to me that you will have to sort out your duties for yourself. Has the secret anything to do with those boys who were at the Court Farm this afternoon?”

Jim checked her again. “In trying times like these we can’t be too careful. Patience, Peggy, patience, for one short half hour.”

Thus adjured, Peggy plodded along silently till they almost lost the path in a tangled mass of underbrush, where an old patch of clearing was fast reverting to wilderness. Suddenly both were startled by a crackling amongst the dry bushes before them. Quick as thought, Jim pulled his sister out of the path and behind the trunk of a fallen forest giant and there they lay, afraid to stir a finger whilst the crackling continued.

Stalks of grass tickled Peggy’s face, creeping things took liberties with her, her limbs ached with the rigidity of her posture whilst the crackling creature kept its secret, as to whether it was man or beast.

Finally it gave its enigma away. It began to whistle (clearly it was not a cow or a bear); it began to sing in a gruff voice (showing itself a man); and it sang a certain bit of doggerel, suggesting that it was not politically of the Tory persuasion.

“That’s Josh Broadway,” whispered Peggy excitedly. “He’s been drinking as usual.”

Jim did not risk even a whisper. He squeezed Peggy’s hand to silence her, while the man, still growling out snatches of his song, sat down on the log. The situation was agonizing, till the tune, such as it was, began to drag curiously, the performer throwing in unexpected rests and pauses, as if he were going to sleep. At last the man keeled over on the rotten trunk and the droning ended in an unmistakable snore. “Now, Peggy, we must creep out of this,” murmured Jim, “There may be others of his sort.”

Thankful to be moving and supremely anxious lest her great-grandmother’s shawl should be soiled or injured, Peggy quickly slid into the path, saying, “Why should we crawl behind logs and stumps, Jim, unless it’s part of your secret? We’ve as good a right as our neighbours to take the short cut home, and, if we meet any one, I’d rather talk to them standing on my feet like a Christian.”

“There’s sense in what you say. Openness may prove the best policy; still we must walk warily till we have passed the Old Court.”

Thirty years earlier, the farm (of which the ancient clearing they were traversing formed part) belonged to a rich young Englishman, who had been in the army. He had squandered his wealth in erecting “a fancy log house,” and elaborate out-buildings; in laying out grounds and entertaining lavishly. Just before the War of 1812, he had taken a whim to go with a company of fur-traders to the North-West leaving his farm in charge of an old servant who was not faithful to his trust. After some years of wandering, Colonel Saxby was killed in a fight with the Indians near Edmonton. His affairs were in confusion, and his Canadian property was involved in a lawsuit, and could neither be sold nor made use of by any one of the claimants to the estate.

The old house, deep in the woods, won the reputation of being haunted, and stories of weird lights and noises grew rife. In early days, people who had special and often dishonourable reasons for keeping out of the public eye, used the house by the connivance of Saxby’s dishonest servants. Later, other “hard characters” did the same and Saxby Court was the scene of more than one tragedy and crime. Consequently the superstitious and imaginative had a fine choice of apparitions with which to scare themselves, from Mississauga warriors, smugglers and makers of moonlight whiskey to the Colonel himself.

About 1833 an American squatter, named Dixon, had patched up the dilapidated servants’ cottage and had settled his family in it—a proceeding which, curiously enough, revived all the gruesome stories associated with the place.

“Jim,” said Peggy, as they approached the Court, “what is that white thing?”

“A birch tree,” replied the boy, “but now, Peggy, don’t you begin—”

“I know. I won’t, Jim. Any way one bit of me laughs at ghost stories, even if the other does get the shivers.”

“Remember, Peggy, father thinks the old smugglers started ghost stories to keep people out of their way.”

“I used not to care, but quite sensible people have been seeing things lately. Jonas Tobin was telling Steve yesterday that old Mr. Ambrose, the doctor’s father, is certain that he saw Colonel Saxby, in his red coat, standing in the doorway with his hand out, just as he had seen him many a time, welcoming his guests when they were both young men.”

“Mark my words, Peggy. Father is right. There is nothing like a ghost story to keep people from prying into things they are not wanted to see. I wish there was no danger of meeting anything worse than ghosts to-night. Who are those three fellows, I wonder?”

“They’ll be clear of the trees in a minute,” said Peggy.

“Why, there’s Jonas, himself,” whispered the boy excitedly. “If he believed his own yarns, he’d not be here at this time of night. But I’d rather meet the Colonel himself than that old tattle-tale. It’ll be all down Dundas Street to-morrow that he met us here at midnight.”

“Tell him the truth,” counselled Peggy, “and let him make the most of it. But, Jim, look, the one on the left is Frank!”

Before Jim could answer, Tobin recognized them and shouted, “Reading Peggy and Jim Lydgate, I declare! Well, well, but it’s time for all lads and lasses to be abed.”

“Come now, Jonas,” struck in Frank Hurd cheerily. “You needn’t make out we three are all old fellows. As for me, bedtime is when I choose to go to bed.”

“Your mother is worrying her heart out for the sight of you, I dare be bound,” said the shoemaker, still addressing Peggy.

“That’s true and that’s why we were glad to take the short cut,” she answered.

“The short cut from—where you’ve been visiting?” inquired the news-vendor.

“Yes, that’s exactly right,” laughed Peggy.

The shoemaker laughed back. His good nature was almost equal to his curiosity. “Trust me, I’ll find out where you’ve been, Peggy Lydgate.”

“They are not talkers where I have been,” she retorted.

“You have told me,” flashed out the man of leather. “You’ve been at the Cranes.”

“Now, Jonas, you have no right to pry into a lady’s secrets,” cried Frank, “but, if Jim will forgive my interfering, I think I can give Miss Peggy a useful hint as to the slippery places on the new bridge, so I’ll wish you both a very good-night.”

Jonas lingered, but his companion, with a brief “Good night all!” took him by the arm and led him off.

As soon as they were out of hearing, Frank remarked, “There’s one thing, Jim. We had better keep away from the Colonel’s old root-house, for some of those mad fellows with the whiskey pail were there less than ten minutes ago. Listen to the row. Get into the bushes, Jim, and I’ll skirt round and see whether the path through the old dining-hall is safe.”

The young man, who had not lost in his town life, the woodcraft of his boyhood, slipped noiselessly from one patch of shadow to another, but Peggy, who feared a drunkard more than any wild beast of the forest, said anxiously, “Oh, Jim, I hope he’ll come to no harm.”

“Never fear. One sober man, with all his wits about him, like Frank, is a match for fifty drunkards. But, Peggy, listen. I told you it was a hot meeting. That wasn’t all. The leaders are becoming convinced that talk won’t move either Sir Francis Head or the British Government, and they want to know who can be counted on to act, if the worst comes to the worst.”

“Act? Do you mean, fight?”

“That’s about it, but do be careful. Peggy, they asked me to get a list of—patriots who would stop at nothing—in Trafalgar Township?”

“Oh, Jim! Of course you said ‘No.’ ”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it, Peggy. Hush, here’s Frank.”

“Wasn’t he at the meeting?”

“Perhaps. That’s nothing. Lots of fellows were there to find out what’s afoot or to stop discussion, if they could. Frank wasn’t in—the inner circle—so to speak. But, remember—on your honour, Peggy!”

Frank reported all clear, but passing through the half-ruinous old dining-room, where the Colonel had been wont to feast his friends, they stopped with one consent in the shadow of the massive chimney.

“Isn’t this a weird place?” whispered Frank. “I’ve been here on a summer’s night when it was full of bats, and I can tell you it was creepy then. Some say there’s a secret chamber under these ruins, where Saxby hid his gold before he went to the North-West. Others declare he never went away at all, but turned smuggler and worked with a gang, who used to run in cargoes of spirits and tobacco down at Bronte. If you stamp hard, just where you are—but don’t do it now, Peggy—there’s a queer hollow sound.”

“How exciting!” said the girl.

“Someday we three will organize an exploring party and see what we can find, won’t we, Jim?”

“Yes, but we must hurry now. Father will be frantic, Peggy.”

When they came to the tree, bridging the Creek, all three crossed it barefoot, Peggy laughingly refusing Frank’s assistance with a brusque, “Nonsense, Frank. I’m not a fine city lady.”

Frank laughed. “Neither fine ladies nor our friends of the root-cellar would like this bridge, I’m afraid.”

“Now, as it’s between us and them, go home, Frank,” entreated Peggy. “You know your mother will be just as much worried as father.”

“I’m glad you sent him away, Peggy,” said Jim. “About that meeting—I got into it half accidentally, following up a turkey. Now what do you think I ought to do?”

“Tell father about it,” answered his sister promptly. “Oh, Jim, it’s a dreadful secret. It looks to me like getting ready to fight.”

“I don’t want to see fighting any more than you do,” returned Jim almost sullenly. “But I tell you this, Peggy, Canadians can’t put up with everything. If England doesn’t want another Revolution on her hands, she’ll have to mend her manners.”

Peggy felt dazed with the terrible situation Jim’s talk suggested. She knew well enough that many, including their own father and Frank’s, were dissatisfied with the management of affairs at Toronto, with the way in which the Executive Council resisted the reforms demanded by the Assembly and with the difficulty of obtaining redress at the hands of the authorities in Great Britain. But Mr. Lydgate always urged that patient and persistent effort to make the statesmen of Britain understand their case would win the day at last, whilst his wife would let no one speak against the King or the Motherland.

As Peggy trudged along, Jim’s secret seemed worse and worse to her, for she knew something, almost at first hand, of what war really is. From her babyhood she had been brought up on tales of what the Loyalists had done and had endured in the long struggle to save the Thirteen Colonies to the Empire. She had seen her father suffering intensely from the wounds he had received at Lundy’s Lane, and now it was her own brother Jim, who was talking of war. “My dear old lad,” she pleaded, “let us tell father. He’ll know what to do.”

“I can’t tell him, at least without thinking it over. As Mackenzie says, there are great issues at stake. The fate of Canada is hanging in the balance. Remember, it is on your honour, sis!”

“Why can’t you say ‘No’, to them. It would break mother’s heart to have one of her sons turn rebel.”

“Who’s talking of rebellion, Peggy? Not I,” said Jim, wishing his sister would not leap so at conclusions. “No one is going to do anything rash.”

“Talk it over with father, Jim. He’d listen without—without being too dreadfully shocked.” Both knew how their mother would take it. “He’d know whether you ought to do anything. Promise me you’ll think about telling him.”

“I don’t know what to do, as I said at first.”

Peggy marched along in silence for five minutes feeling as if her feet and her heart and the book she had wanted so much were all as heavy as lead. Suddenly she spoke again—so suddenly that Jim actually started.

“I can tell father about the shouting and Josh Broadway and what Frank said. I’m not on my honour about these. I can and I will. They are not your secret and if Tobin is mixed up in them, as he appears to be, they won’t be anyone’s secret long.”

“That’s true.”

“Besides, Jim—” Peggy’s tone was gentler now—“if the Governor heard how badly people are feeling about the way the officials up at Toronto manage things he might try to make them do better.”

“I’m afraid Sir Francis Bond Head is not that sort of man. He’d like to be Czar of all the Russias, I do believe. He does not understand what the people need or think; and I doubt if he cares either.”

“Well, dear, do talk to father. If you will, I’ll keep out of it. I will really. He is sure to know what is best. He has time to think and he does think. He’s the wisest man I know.”

“Peggy, it’s awfully difficult. I’ve been to one or two meetings. If you’d been there and heard Mackenzie speak, you’d have felt the same. While you’re listening to him he makes you feel ready to shed the last drop of your blood to set Canada free. I’m afraid to talk to father lest I should say what I’m bound in honour to keep to myself. The worst of me is that I see things one way to-day and a different way to-morrow. Believe me, Peggy, I’m not treacherous at heart—”

“No, no, Jim.”

—“but I’ve got into such a mix-up. Some one is sure to think me a traitor.”

Peggy stopped, turned and gave him a good hug. “Poor, poor Jim,” she murmured.

“And, if the neighbours get it into their heads that I am faithless, they may make horrible trouble—if there should be fighting—for us all,” he muttered gloomily. “You have no idea how hot some of them are and how many men are bound to have a change. If you tell father things and father gets excited and does something, they’ll think I’ve betrayed them.”

Peggy thought over the whole situation again, as far as she could see it, and then said gravely, “Jim, as I told you before, I can’t tell you what is your duty and what is not—and father would say the same. I know he’d tell you that only God can make clear to anyone just what is right for him to do in such a terrible difficulty as this. But it’s the same for me. I’ve got to try to do my own duty—even if it hurts myself—or some one I love—and it appears to me that I must tell father all I know that isn’t your secret. Oh, look, there’s a light.”

Possibly there was something familiar in the energetic way in which that lantern was bobbing through the trees. At any rate Jim asserted with conviction, “It’s John. Listen a minute, Peggy. Don’t speak to father to-night. Sleep on it, as mother says, and—tell me in the morning what you are going to do.”

“You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“No-o—not exactly—but I wish—I’d kept the thing to myself. Hush, hush, don’t say a word before—the others. Hallo,” he called aloud, “is that you, John?”

“Yes, it’s me sure enough. I thought you might take the short cut when I saw Craig and those other fellows cutting down the tree this morning. Have you got the book, Peggy?”

Peggy had lived through so much since she had borrowed the book that she was almost surprised to find her big brother as keen about it as he had been in the morning. For her the values of life seemed quite altered by Jim’s secret, until the excited and delighted family poured out to meet them, and then things came suddenly right side up again.

Soon she had them all laughing over her house-breaking exploit, though her father shook his head and said as usual, “What would your grandmother think?” and her mother tried to took severe and signally failed.

Peggy told briefly how alarmed they had been in the afternoon and how she had brought down the gun from the garret and had given Miss Crane a second fright. Then it was Jim’s turn to relate how that lady had tried to overawe him by pointing the old blunderbuss at him, and to the huge delight of his little brothers, he took his own gun and staring wildly, backed into the corner and showed how the barrel had wobbled.

“She really did look something like that,” explained Peggy, “but we are going to like them all three, mother. How can people call the Cranes stuck-up? Mrs. Crane is as sweet as she can be. Miss Crane is very—unusual, but I don’t think she’s any more proud than you or me, mother.”

This was a controversial topic, on which Mrs. Lydgate refused to enter at the witching hour of midnight, and soon both Jim and Peggy forgot the excitement and perplexities of the day in sleep, which, if not quite dreamless, was deep, long and refreshing.

THE LETTER.

The next night brought not only the Bennetts but Frank Hurd to the promised reading. This addition to her audience was rather disturbing to Peggy, making her sadly conscious of every blunder; but when she had finished her chapter, Robin discovered a little book in the visitor’s pocket. It contained Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”, and then nothing would do but Frank must read that. He read it well. It kindled Peggy’s imagination wonderfully with its simple music and weird pictures, and for days afterwards her father was heard so often murmuring over to himself some half recollected passage, that Peggy, who had accepted the loan pressed upon her of this book also, helped him to get the whole long poem by heart.

Frank came twice to the readings before returning to Toronto, then followed two nights when Steve and his wife did not come either. Going to investigate, John and Peggy found both the old people ill. Of course they stayed to do various chores, indoors and out.

Dusk fell before their ministrations were completed, and John remarked, “We shall have to put our best foot foremost to get any time for King Richard to-night.”

Swinging along briskly through a cold drizzling rain, they had reached the Twin Oaks, when they heard a sharp cry from somewhere near the bridge down in the ravine.

“Some fellow in trouble,” said John. “Must have seen our light. Come along, sis.”

“I do want to get home,” sighed Peggy. “Isn’t it too bad? and on such a nasty night?”

“Don’t growl, Peggy. We must see what the trouble is.”

Peggy sank into ashamed silence till astonishment at the sight of the distressed travellers restored her powers of speech, for it was Mr. and Mrs. Crane, muddy and all but despairing, who, for the last half hour, had been endeavouring to mend the back axle of their little wagon. It had come to grief on a deplorable bump in the steep road leading upward from the bridge.

But John was in his element. He did masterly things with his clasp-knife, a stout young sapling and an end of rope, which he chanced to have concealed about his person, whilst Peggy held the lantern and the other three, including Dobbin, looked on. After testing his repairs with various shakings and pullings, John pronounced the verdict that the vehicle would be “safe for another half day’s driving.”

But Mr. Crane said, “Having met you we can turn round and go home. When we were at the Post Office this afternoon,”—it was one of Mr. Crane’s peculiarities, according to his neighbours, that “he was always at the Post Office”—“we heard that there was an English letter for your father. It had been sent west by mistake and returned and had since been lying for two or three weeks in the office, so we undertook its delivery. We felt it might be important.”

“One always wants news from home as quickly as possible,” put in Mrs. Crane in her pleasant voice.

“But the money, sir? How much did it cost?” asked practical John. In those days few letters came prepaid and many were never claimed by those to whom they were addressed.

Apparently it had suddenly occurred to Mr. Crane that he ought to hurry home. At any rate he made no reply.

But John insisted. “Please, sir, what was the charge?”

“Three and six, but don’t let that trouble you,” and Mr. Crane’s careless air confirmed the impression that the Lydgates shared with their neighbours that he was rich, whereas the Cranes had denied themselves the sugar they had intended to buy, in order to take that letter with their own.

Peggy plucked John’s sleeve and whispered, “Perhaps we could do something with that little pig?” Both were perfectly well aware that the family could not raise such a sum as three shillings and sixpence without a special and strenuous effort.

The Englishman, who half heard the suggestion and was pleased with their independence of spirit, answered with a smile, “No, no, you have pulled us out of the mud, and we are quits.”

“But you wouldn’t have got into that bad place at all, if it hadn’t been for our letter,” protested Peggy.

“Never mind that, Miss Lydgate. Tell your father I’m coming some day to have a chat with him. Good-night.”

“Wouldn’t it have been dreadful, John, if you had let me keep you from going to help them. I’m glad they are not the talking kind, that say a great deal about ‘how good one is’. If they had been, I should have had to tell that I didn’t want to help them.”

“What a mixture you are, Peggy. If thoughts made tracks, like footsteps—”

“I know,” cried Peggy, pleased with the fancy. “Yours would go straight on, but mine would be a twisty, twirly track, like of a man who’s lost something in the bush, or a cow when the pasture is poor. But, oh, John, aren’t you dying to know what’s in that letter?”

They had scarcely got inside the house, when Peggy poured out the whole story—“The Cranes’ wagon broke down near the bridge, father, and John went to help, and they gave him a letter for you—not one of Granny’s—and it had been sent I don’t know where by mistake and they paid three and sixpence for it.”

“Paid for my letter? That was very kind, but we must make that right, must we not, mother? Peggy, do you suppose you can read it?”

She took the little package jauntily, opened it with care and then—there was no more spirit left in her, for not a word could she read after “My dear Lesley,” which she partly guessed at knowing that letters usually began in some such style. She stared helplessly at the crabbed writing. It was hopeless, and, pushing the paper into her father’s hands she fell, crying, on his neck. “Oh, dear,” she wailed, “I can’t make out one word except your name.”

Mr. Lydgate tenderly stroked her hair. “We must get some one else to read it. Don’t cry, little Margaret. It’s not your fault. I’ve been thinking, ever since you and Robin brought home ‘The Talisman’, that we must find some way to have every one of you taught to read and to write.”

“That we must,” said Mrs. Lydgate heartily. “I’d like to keep the reading of our letters to ourselves.”

“Besides most of our near neighbours are in the same case as ourselves,” added her husband.

“I wonder who wrote it?” said Robin.

“Try for the name at the end, sis,” suggested Jim.

With renewed hope, Peggy tried again, but on the last pages the writing was “crossed” to save paper and postage, and the result was maddening. She puzzled over it for fifteen minutes, to exclaim at last triumphantly, “Why, the end word is Lydgate, of course.”

“And the word before that?” asked her father eagerly.

“I believe it’s my name, at least it begins R-O-B,” put in Robin.

“Robert? Robert Lydgate? My cousin, perhaps,” muttered the blind man. “But he has never written to me since I left England.”

“There’s a funny short word before the name,” said Peggy, puckering up her forehead into a frown. “It looks like C-O-Z.”

“Coz, short for cousin. Yes, that must be my dear old chum, Bob Lydgate. You are doing bravely, little girl.”

“I wish I could really read it. It will be dreadful to wait two whole weeks for the minister to come to Hannahsville again.” Mr. Lydgate usually asked “the minister”, Mr. Whitby, to read the letters of his mother, his only regular correspondent, for two reasons. It took an expert to decipher her pointed handwriting, and this reader could be trusted never to gossip about his parishioners’ private affairs.

“It may be best to wait, Peggy,” said her father uncertainly. “Cousin Robert may have something to say which he would wish to be kept in the family. Only I hope—it is no bad news—about my dear mother.”

“Father, we shall not need to wait long,” broke in Peggy’s next younger brother, Tom. “Mr. Whitby has sent word by Pete that he’ll have a short service next Sunday at Simon Hurd’s on his way to Hannahsville. Why shouldn’t we go early and get him to read the letter as soon as he comes?”

“You blessed, blessed boy,” cried Peggy. “That’s a grand idea,” and so said they all.

Sunday was an ideal autumn day. On their way to Simon Hurd’s in the ox-wagon, the Lydgates picked up Steve and his wife.

The wagon was a humble home-made affair, built of a few planks, but the sleek, docile, red-brown oxen were the pride of John’s heart. The elders of the party, wrapped in rough furry coats and grey mufflers sat in state on seats of plank slung from leather straps, and the boys piled in anyhow on the straw covered with quilts in the wagon bottom. John, of whom his mother always thought when she heard the story of the anointing of young David, for he too “was ruddy and of a fair countenance”, walked with a happy expression beside his big pets, guiding them more with his voice than with his long pole. His sister walked too, in the glory of her crimson hood and brilliant shawl.

“Peggy looks fine to-day,” observed Tom. “That’s a nice hood, mother.”

“Tell me about it, Tom,” said his father, smiling.

“Well, father, she would look very much like a red-headed woodpecker with that shining silk affair on her head and her grey gown, only she’s gone and put on that grand shawl of mother’s and that has a bit of everything in it, crimson and blue and pale green and a sort of gold colour, as if the man who made it was thinking of a sunset.”

“Lesley, you have seen it. Don’t you remember the shawl I wore the day you took me to Ancaster, just before we were married? It was mother’s then, but she sent it and the hood to me after the fire.”

“Yes, yes, I do remember and they tell me Peggy has grown very like what you were then.”

“I suppose she is, Lesley, only a little bonnier, perhaps.”

“Don’t you believe her, Lesley,” said old Bennett. “Peggy’s the very image of what her mother was when I first clapped eyes on her.”

Five minutes later, they turned in at the Hurds’ and John called over his shoulder, “Father, here’s the minister, just ahead of us. There’ll be lots of time for the letter.”

“Let father hear it first, children. Don’t crowd in on them when the minister is reading,” said Mrs. Lydgate.

Robin sighed. “I just ache to hear it.”

“We’re all aching as much as you,” said Tom, “but, after all, it’s father’s letter. Come along, boy, and help to fix the seats for the folk.”

Busy as they made themselves, it seemed an age to the impatient youngsters, before they were called into the great chimney corner of Simon Hurd’s big living-room, to hear the minister read for the second time the crisscrossed epistle that had given them all so much searching of heart.

And it contained a piece of news that took away their breath, delightful or alarming as one chanced to look at it.

In brief, it was that Robert Lydgate had been appointed First Classical Master in Upper Canada College; that he and his family would sail for Canada in the spring and that they were looking forward with the greatest happiness to the thought of seeing all their “Canadian” cousins.

John whistled. Robin threw up his cap and shouted. Tom said, to no one in particular, “Don’t you wish they may like us for relations?” and Peggy remarked enigmatically, “Something has got to be done. I’ll tell you one thing, boys, we don’t want to disgrace them. Do we?”

“Let’s send ’em word to stay at home,” said Jim, with a queer twist of his mouth. “What do you want to do, Peggy? Build a new house, or run your country?”

“I have ideas,” replied Peggy. “Only I feel like an old hen, when she hears cheeps inside the shells. The chickens may hatch out or they may not.”

“And you’re rather fond, Peggy, of counting your chickens before they are hatched. Leave them alone till after the service,” advised Jim. “The people are all waiting in the kitchen and are dying to know what’s in the wind, as you and I would be, in their shoes.”

“You are right, my son. We must not keep them waiting,” said Mr. Lydgate.

Peggy was so excited that she hardly knew what was happening till her mother, who usually led the hymns, began “O God, our help in ages past.” It was a favourite with her as with her father, but her attention soon wandered again.

She wondered whether “the classical master” would be like father; whether “his lady” would speak and act and sit like Miss Crane; and whether both would be dreadfully shocked—as she supposed the Cranes were—by the fact that none of them had been to school and that even their mother could not read. The thought of having to make this last confession put Peggy on the defensive.

“It isn’t as if mother can’t do lots and lots of things that fine ladies know nothing about,” she said to herself hotly. “And it wasn’t her fault that no one sent her to school. She had been too useful, baking, washing, planting even when she was a little girl, and she’d married at seventeen, and there’d been the babies and the fire, daddy’s helplessness, the farm work to do, Robin always ailing till this very last year, and sick neighbours continually wanting help. If she couldn’t read,”—Peggy staring at the minister with unseeing eyes looked positively defiant—“she had brought them all up decently. Mother was a saint on earth and if their grand relations dared to put on any airs towards her they should hear some plain truths. Surely it was as useful to build a chimney”—and Mrs. Lydgate had done that with John’s help—“as to read a book; and to look after a poor wretch down with the cholera”—Peggy never could forget that grim memory of 1832—“as to write a letter.” Her mother had found the man at death’s door near the Twin Oaks, had got the neighbours to put up a rude shelter for him, and had nursed him back to life.

Suddenly, in the midst of her imaginary tirade, the girl discovered that the minister was talking of “Letters”, and this was the amazing thing he was saying—“Perhaps some of us cannot write letters with pen and ink, but we all may be ‘letters of Christ’, as the apostle Paul put it, with His messages of truth and love—so plainly written in our hearts, that they may be known and read of all men.”

Peggy looked up, met the minister’s eyes, gave him a little nod of comprehension, and was comforted to think that no one who knew her mother and this wonderful Bible thought about Christ’s letters could miss the meaning of her life.

Yet the girl still brooded over those little cheeping ideas of which she had spoken before the service. That night she even dreamed that when the cousins came every one of the family could read and write and no one disgraced anybody.

PEGGY’S IDEA.

When, on the following morning, Mr. and Mrs. Lydgate were rubbing away in company at the wash tub, Peggy heard the latter say, “I feel rather afraid of Robert and his wife, Lesley. You are all right, but what will they think of the rest of us?”

“They will love you, Mary,” but he added after a long silence, “I wonder—would it be better to give them a hint that we have never had a school near us?”

“I don’t know,” said his wife doubtfully, as she went to the line with a basketful of clothes.

“Please, father, don’t say anything in your letter to Cousin Robert about our being such poor scholars,” said Peggy softly. “They can’t be here for months yet and I do think I’m going to get an idea.”

The idea which Peggy was understood to be working upon became rather a joke when she continued for a whole week to report vaguely that she thought it was coming. “Like butter, when the cream’s too cold,” observed Tom. “So is Christmas coming and spring and the cousins.”

“I don’t believe it’s a real idea at all, Peggy,” said Jim, “or you’d tell us what it’s about.”

“I will tell you. It’s about your not being able to read worth anything; my not being able to read writing and mispronouncing words and spelling awfully. John no better off, and the other boys, except little Robin, not even caring whether they can read or not. It’s an awful state of affairs. Didn’t you feel cheap when not one of us could make out that letter?”

Whatever Jim felt he liked to tease his sister, so he said, “We’ve got along well enough without schooling for a good many years, so I don’t see why we should put ourselves out to show off before the classical cousin.”

“To show off before our cousins!” Peggy repeated scornfully. “As if that were all!”

“Then why such excitement just now? One can have lots of fun, without reading, if one knows where to get it. You should have heard the fellows at the Blue Boar yesterday, when I dropped in to get warm on my way home with the flour. Talk of newspapers, father,” Jim lowered his voice, “one must meet men to know how things are really going. While I was there, Peggy’s friend, William Mackenzie, came bustling in, and you should have heard him talk about the government, and the land-grabbers and the gagging of people who dare to call attention to the abuses under which we labour. He used to believe, before his journey to England, that British statesmen would see clearly enough to right our wrongs, but now, he says, there’s no help except in our own good right hands; and freedom to work out our own destiny must be our goal.”

Mr. Lydgate frowned. “Mackenzie has done good work, but that’s going to the verge of treason—if you have reported him correctly, my son.”

“I think I have, father. He got the fellows all worked up over the Clergy Reserves, and the huge blocks of wild lands that the government has given away, but after all, father, I’ve heard you speak pretty strongly about the hindrance they are to our getting schools and churches and good roads. And you know how it is if a fellow wants a bit of fun, in these parts, there’s nowhere to go but the taverns. Is there, father?”

“I don’t like taverns nor the company that frequents them. Some of the young fellows may be all right, but you know what goes on in them as well as I do. Don’t risk it, dear lad!”

“All right, father. Don’t worry. I’ll keep clear of Johnny’s,” but he went out, slamming the door as if he were annoyed. Then he put in his head again to say, “What can we do, father? The kind of people you would like us to be friendly with would be ashamed to have us in their parlours. You were brought up a gentleman, but what chance have we ever had?”

“Peggy, child, what is this idea of yours?” asked Mr. Lydgate, when the door slammed again. “Is it likely it would help to keep Jim away from Johnny’s?”

Peggy fervently hoped that it might, and from other places no less questionable. She explained what it was and her father’s face grew hopeful. “Suppose you consult mother?” he said.

Mrs. Lydgate saw many objections to the idea, but Peggy met them one by one, and her father took her side in the argument. Finally her mother said, “Well, my dear, if you want to try it, you must, and nobody will be better pleased than I, if it proves a success. But I think it would be wiser for us to try to arrange for you to go to school for a while.”

“But I should be only one,” replied her daughter oracularly, “and we have so little time to count on. Mayn’t I speak to John?”

Whatever she said to John must have been convincing. At any rate he agreed to go with her next morning to the Cranes, ostensibly to take two nice fat wild ducks and a loaf of bread, hot from the Dutch oven, but really to try to put the idea in motion.

They had now entered on November and a light fall of snow had turned the woods into fairyland. All sorts of tiny tracks in the snow claimed Peggy’s attention, but her brother set a steady pace with the result that they reached their destination about ten o’clock and found all three of the Cranes at home.

After the ducks had been presented, John went out with the master of the house and Peggy tried to broach her errand, but found it difficult to put into words.

“Are you ready yet for the third volume of ‘The Talisman’?” asked Ellen.

Peggy shook her head, a mode of reply which caused the ex-governess to look so disapproving that the visitor wondered what she had done now.

Sunny Mrs. Crane came to the rescue. “How about the letter, Peggy? I hope it contained good news.”

This gave an opening. “That depends on what you call good news,” was the cautious response. “It was from my father’s cousin. He is coming out to be Classical Master at Upper Canada College and is going to pay us a visit, with his wife.”

“Don’t you like them?”

“Father likes him. The rest of us don’t know them. But the awful part is, suppose they think us a disgrace? Would you believe it, Mrs. Crane”—Peggy’s dark eyes met the sympathetic brown ones with deepest anxiety and her voice sank to a whisper—“You never would believe it, but not one of us can read writing or do more than write our names and most of us can’t read print.” The girl did not dare to glance towards the tall slim figure by the table, for she knew that Miss Crane must be too horrified for words.

“But reading and writing is not everything,” answered the pretty little chirrupy voice. “You can do so many things—make bread, build chimneys, split rails and—concoct soap that will really wash things.”

Peggy shook her head and continued, “Father went to school, and he thinks we ought to know at least some of the things he learnt when he was a boy (not Latin and Greek perhaps) but there’s no school and no one to teach us— Oh, I don’t know how to put it right— Please don’t be angry, Miss Crane—unless you would.”

The idea was out now.

Miss Crane gasped. “Why, Peggy,” she said, “you could not walk all these miles every day, especially in the winter.”

“I’m strong but it would be hard work often,” admitted Peggy, “and if I could, Bertram hardly could and Robin certainly couldn’t and mother ought not to.”

Miss Crane gasped again. “Mother!” she repeated.

“Yes, mother,” returned Peggy reddening. “No, no, Miss Crane, that’s not our plan.”

“But I have always insisted that if I am to teach at all, I must have regular attendance,” replied the lady, with the severest expression.

Peggy ceased to beat about the bush and asked with startling directness. “What would you take to come and stay with us a month or two at a time and teach us all?”

“Teach you all?”

“Yes, all except father—the six boys and me—and—and mother.”

At the last softly-spoken word the little blue-eyed lady looked up quickly at Peggy, and as quickly looked down again at her knitting.

“Let me understand this proposition,” said Miss Crane. “Do you mean literally that you desire me to become a resident governess to the whole family with the exception of your father?”

Peggy nodded. “That’s about it,” she answered, “but now how can we arrange about re—re— What was it father called it?—Re—mune—something— At any rate what he meant was the pay.”

“The salary, I presume you mean?” questioned Miss Crane with a blank expression. “Oh, I don’t think I could consider it.”

“Oh, please, please, Miss Crane—” stammered Peggy, looking quite wild and touzled in her eagerness.

Mrs. Crane again came to the rescue. “Perhaps my sister would like you to explain exactly what you have in mind?”

“We talked of different ways of paying,” said Peggy, “but we don’t know how much you would think them worth, and how much the sal-a-ry ought to be. Perhaps it’s quite hopeless, but oh, Miss Crane, if you can come for two or three months, we’ll be thankful to you for ever and ever. We’ll do everything we know to make you comfortable, and we’ll work out the money or pay you cash—whatever you say—as quickly as we can. Mother thinks she could get along without me for a month or so at a time, and I’d come and clean up for you or make soap or spin or mould candles; and teach you everything I know about our ways in the bush.”

Ellen opened her mouth as if to protest that bush-ways were the last thing she desired to learn, but Peggy went on, “And then there are the boys. Mr. Crane would find it much quicker clearing the land if he had a boy like John, or Jim, or even Tom, that knew about chopping and oxen.” Mr. Crane’s ways with his oxen were a subject for mirth along half the length of Dundas Street, so the would-be diplomatist touched this point lightly.

But hope was waning, for, the longer she talked, the more suggestions she poured forth, the more stiff and rigid became the lady whose heart she was trying to soften.

“Come away into the kitchen, Peggy. Give my sister time to think over what you have said,” advised Mrs. Crane.

As once before, Ellen suddenly melted into a storm of hysterical tears—“I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t teach when my mind’s upset and I’ve never tried boys. I can’t do it. Milly, don’t say I ought to?”

Milly did not say she ought to, but it did strike her that the congenial occupation might be a grand thing for her, and she knew her sister-in-law could teach. Then the situation struck her as so funny, she could not help but smile as she busied herself, with Peggy’s assistance, in preparing dinner.

In itself it was a successful dinner, and, though Peggy and Ellen were uncomfortably silent, this was the less noticeable because both James Crane and John were unusually talkative. At last John looked across at Peggy, suggested they ought to be going home and asked, point blank whether Miss Crane would consent to come to them.

This was the first her brother had heard of the proposition.

Mrs. Crane explained in her whimsical way and her husband said, jestingly, “Well, well, Ellen, so you are thinking of taking up your teaching again? I knew you’d never be happy without it.” Then he turned to his young guests, “Strange, the difference in families. I can’t teach any one anything, but my sister has a perfect genius for teaching. I promise you, if you can induce her to undertake you, you’ll have to learn, young people.”

“I’ll do my best, though I’m not so fond of a book as Peggy, to learn anything you’ll teach me, ma’am,” said John, in his quiet way, “and if you’ll set your price and give us a little time, it will go hard with us, if we don’t pay it in full.”

“Ellen, may I speak to you, for a minute?” murmured Mrs. Crane, leading the way into her bedroom.

The minute was a long one. The low hum of voices got on Peggy’s nerves and she wondered that John, at such a crisis, could calmly discuss the turnip crop and the state of the roads. But “all’s well that ends well!”

At length Miss Crane came back and announced, “I will try for a month, Peggy, whether I can be of use in instructing you and as many members of your family as may care to join the class in reading, writing and ciphering; and, if you will, either you or one of your brothers may give a month’s work on the farm here (that is, if Mr. Crane agrees to it) in exchange for my services. I may add that it is hopeless to teach without the pupils’ very best attention and co-operation.”

She looked so stiff and prim that John felt anything but elated at the prospect of entering the paths of learning under such guidance, but feeling it incumbent on him to make some response, he answered vaguely, “Yes, ma’am.”

Not so Peggy. She flew at her stern preceptress that was to be, hugged her, executed a little dance and poured out a torrent of thanks.

“The deed is done, father. John will fetch her in the ox-wagon next Monday and she’ll stay a month and see how we all get on,” announced Peggy, when they got home.

“Who is she? and what is she coming for?” demanded Jim.

“She is Miss Crane and she’s coming to teach us reading, writing and arithmetic.”

“Teach? Who?” This from Tom; Jim only whistled.

“You and me and Robin and all of us. Mr. Crane says she’s an awfully good teacher, but—” added Peggy, dropping from the heights of enthusiasm to half-unconscious mimicry of their benefactor—“she does say funny things. What was it, John?—‘Do you mean that I am to be resident governess to the whole family?’ ”

“Ye stars and stripes!” ejaculated Jim. “Fancy you and me, John, with a resident governess at this time of day, teaching us A-B, Ab, and to turn out our toes, and say, ‘Yes, sir’, and ‘No, ma’am’.”

“I hope, Jim,” said his father slyly, “that it will be ‘Yes, ma’am,’ to this lady, who is going to be so good as to repair to some extent the neglect of your education.”

Jim smiled. “Well, Peggy, so that was what you were brewing all last week, was it? It was an idea in very truth, and so when our classical cousin comes, instead of our disgracing him, he’ll find us all nicely finished in the Lydgate Academy.”

“Tell you what, Peggy, if it wasn’t for the fun we’ve had out of that book of Scott’s, I’d kick at this child’s school notion of yours,” said Tom. “What’s the use of book-learning any way to farmers?”

“No one needs it more,” answered Mr. Lydgate, “if they are to take their rightful place in the country. Listen, boys, all of you. Should this plan of Peggy’s work out, you will be thanking her for it every day of your lives. As for me, I cannot tell you, what a comfort it will be if it saves you from being condemned to lifelong ignorance through my miserable selfishness and carelessness.”

“There is one thing more,” went on the blind man after a moment’s silence. “Before Miss Crane comes, I want you to promise, boys, that you will show her the respect and gratitude she deserves and endeavour to get the most you can out of her instructions.”

“We will, sir,” said Jim seriously; and the others echoed his words.

The family threw itself with a will into preparations for the reception of their learned guest. Peggy turned out of her beloved little bedroom (partitioned off the kitchen) into a sort of “cubby-hole” at the top of the stairs next to the garret, where the boys slept, and many a morning during the following winter she had a nice little white drift on her patchwork bed quilt.

Jim, being handy with tools, constructed a pine dressing-table and a bedstead, with a bottom of woven ropes instead of springs—a task over which Robin constituted himself superintendent.

As usual the neighbours became interested in “the doings”, and the very day the bedstead was finished, old Steve came hobbling in with a beaming smile and a small pot of sky-blue paint.

“My missis sent you this for the room,” he explained. “She had me buy the powder for her three years ago in Toronto, thinking to paint over the old chest of drawers mother brought from Scotland, but Mrs. Simon happened in and said, ‘Don’t you do it, Jeanie. It’s good mahogany’, and she turned to and polished it up like a looking-glass. There was nothing else good enough to use that paint on, so it’s been lying by till Jeanie got a drop of oil and ground it all in nicely yesterday, for we thought a bit of something bright on that new bedstead and the table and the frame of the mirror maybe, might help to settle her and be better for all parties concerned.”

The paint, accepted with gratitude and applied with extreme care and economy, made Peggy feel like a stranger in the little room that had been hers since the house was built. But wasn’t it gorgeous? People from a distance dropped in to see it, including Mrs. Simon Hurd herself. But she was actuated by the desire to discover what she could give or lend from her ample stores to aid in making the teacher feel at home. She admired the furniture to the hearts’ content of its makers and decorators, approved emphatically of the effect of the deerskin rug upon the floor, then went home and sent her husband down with a wonderful blue-and-white quilt, a bit of an old dimity dress for a window curtain and an ancient and beautiful blue jug for a water-pitcher.

Monday dawned unkindly with a sleet storm from the east, and opinions differed as to whether the Englishwoman would face the long, slow drive in John’s ox-sled. She did face it, though she arrived shivering and dispirited, but the first glimpse of the tiny room, so beautifully fresh and clean despite its eccentricities, really did its part in “settling her”. And when Peggy had her comfortably toasting before the kind of fire that one winter’s experience had not taught Mr. Crane to build; and Mrs. Lydgate had administered a cup of deliciously hot broth as a panacea against “the chills”, the rigid lady began to thaw not only in body but in spirit.

THE LYDGATE ACADEMY.

Under her shy and rather forbidding exterior, Miss Crane was what is called to-day “a good sport”. Having come to teach the Lydgates she insisted on giving her first lesson that very afternoon. For this event the family was marshalled round the table in the same order as at meal-times, save that the teacher took Mr. Lydgate’s place at the head of the table, and very soon the pupils saw a new Miss Crane who absolutely forgot herself in the delight of her work. She kept them all busy, reading or learning the alphabet; copying figures or straight strokes and pot-hooks on shingles, with pointed sticks carefully blackened in the fire, and, when the class broke up, all felt they had gained at least a step along what thirteen-year-old Arthur (who had a taste for sounding phrases) dubbed “the Royal Road to Learning”.

Jim, on his way to the barn, patted his sister on the back and remarked, “I don’t mind telling you, Peg, that I begin to have hopes of your idea.”

“Wasn’t mother wonderful?” whispered Peggy.

“Yes, she can do anything she makes up her mind to do.” He still lingered with a meditative air.

“What is it, Jim?” she asked.

“I’m thinking, Peggy, perhaps we shall not all be farmers always.”

“Were you thinking that, Jim? What are you going to do?”

“Oh,” he answered gaily, “there’s all the world before a man with an education, especially in a new country like this. Of course I’ve got to get past the A-B-C”—he screwed up his forehead in a whimsical grimace—“before I decide whether I’m going to be a lawyer or a surveyor or a merchant; but I believe I’ll be a member of the Assembly any way. What have you in your head, Peggy?”

“Nothing very exciting. Sometimes I have thought it would be good to be a teacher; but I may never have time for that, and I suppose my bit of learning wouldn’t be lost if it made me a more worth-while woman—” Peggy hesitated— “I hardly know how to say it—just for ordinary, everyday living.”

“Ordinary, everyday living!” repeated Jim. “Why don’t you see, Peggy, that means everything? If learning is good for living, it’s good for everything inside living, so we can all go ahead on A-B, ab, with clear consciences.”

“Well, I shall be satisfied for this winter, if we all learn to read well enough—say—to be able to make out the words of a new hymn right off, and if most of us get to write so that—people can read our letters just a little bit more easily than Cousin Robert’s.”

“Oh, ho! next thing you’ll be wondering is whether His Learnedness is going to disgrace us, and all because we’ve had one lesson from our resident governess.”

“It does sound rather silly,” admitted Peggy, “but this thing seems too good to be true. I do hope no one will fall sick or anything, so that Miss Crane will have to go home.”

Yet, before the first month was out, even Peggy began to look forward with something like pleasure to the days when the Lydgate Academy should close for the holidays.

The learning of reading, writing and arithmetic, under such a task-mistress, in a race against time and the classical cousins was sufficiently strenuous; but it was bearable. The real anguish of the situation came in when Miss Crane, after disapproving observation of the young Lydgates’ table manners, suggested to their parents that “deportment” should be added to the course. They assented with gratitude, Mrs. Lydgate being especially thankful that her children should have this chance of improvement that (owing to her own lack of education) she did not feel competent to give them.

“The children” themselves found it a blessing difficult to accept with thankfulness. As Tom remarked restively, one noon when he had been corrected three times in succession, for coming to the table with his hair standing on end, for putting his knife in his mouth and for helping himself to butter before passing it to his mother, “Deportment appears to mean everything no one wants to do naturally.”

As for Peggy, “deportment”, in the person of Miss Crane, frowned on her going barefoot, touzling her hair with her hands in moments of excitement; objected to her violent embraces; disturbed her enjoyment of her meals; and made her nervous where she had formerly walked with an assured tread.

“My dear Peggy,” Miss Crane would begin in her condescending, deliberate fashion, “it is hardly consonant with the usages of good society to pick a bone with your teeth,” or—as the case might be—“to interrupt your father, when he is speaking”, or, “to slap your brother on the back at table.”

After a fortnight of this kind of thing, which as Miss Crane was gracious enough to explain, she herself had had to endure for years, and which, she gave Peggy to understand, was the common heritage of all “nicely brought up young ladies”, the girl, on one occasion, dashed out into the barn to hide her ignominy and flung herself, face downward on the straw in the mow, debating angrily within herself, whether the game was going to be worth its cost. “She is a good teacher, when it comes to book-learning,” was her decision, “but it’s horrid, horrid, to live with her and her deportment.”

She had not recovered her calm when she heard footsteps and John’s voice said, “Poor Peggy, this Academy business is getting rather too much of a good thing, even for her.”

“Poor Peggy!—it’s poor all-of-us!” laughed Jim so merrily, that Peggy, in spite of her rage could hardly help laughing too. “Her turn to-day to get rapped over the knuckles, mine to-morrow and then all of us at once. But, never mind, John, we have a fine teacher. You and I will be reading words of three syllables before we know where we are, and Peggy’s getting on like a house-on-fire.”

“Oh, well, I can stand it, if the rest of you can,” muttered John.

“And am I not meek? I’d say, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,’ if she told me that in good society it was ‘the usage’ to put the tails of the oxen in curl-papers—”

This suggestion struck the concealed third at the conversation as so supremely ridiculous that she broke into a peal of laughter. Jim promptly dived into the mow, exclaiming in a precisely modulated tone, “My dear Peggy, all authorities are agreed that eavesdropping is a breach both of deportment and decorum”; and dragged out his sister, tear-stained, laughing and dishevelled. “Alas, alas, what would be the feelings of our illustrious relative could he see you now?” he demanded with mock gravity.

Then with a sudden change of tone, he said briskly, “Look here, Peg, let’s thresh this thing out—what’s the trouble?”

“You know, Jim. She never lets us alone—and, to hear her, father must think we’re doing such hateful things.”

“Don’t worry about father. He’s not making any mistake; but I can see if Miss Crane wasn’t a sort of half-and-half visitor mother would blaze up pretty hotly sometimes. Yet, Peggy, no one is better pleased than mother—when she thinks the thing over calmly—with this idea of yours, and I tell you frankly it was a mighty good idea.”

“Do you really mean it, Jim?”

“That I do. What’s more, Peggy, we’re really fine and lucky that you got some one who can not only teach reading and writing but knows about these other things, we never used to think of. As for me, I hope she’ll stay with us all winter.”

“She won’t,” said Peggy, “she’s getting to hate us all; and it’s only because she’s a sort of never-say-die person that she’s staying the month.”

“Not a bit of it! She loves teaching and she loves setting people right, and she’s having the time of her life with such a lot of ‘unmannerly young colonists’ to train up in the way they should go so as not to disgrace—we’ll say—Upper Canada College.”

“Well,” said John, “while she is here we’ve got to give her a chance, and I promised to learn a column of spelling before the lesson this afternoon.”

He went out and, taking from his pocket an ancient spelling-book that had done duty, years before, in the Misses Jowett’s Select Academy, began to pace up and down the track between the barn and the house, muttering over letters and words in a dogged kind of sing-song.

“It’s tough work for John,” commented Jim, “but, when he does read, he’ll get as much out of books as any one—he’s such a quiet, thoughtful, steady-going lad. As for me, Peggy, since I first heard that fellow, Mackenzie, talk, I’d gladly put in four months of worse work than this just to read the papers. I do want to know what people are doing and thinking.”

“Jim, have you told father what they want you to do yet?”

“Not exactly; but I’ve talked to him about Mackenzie’s arguments, and he says, ‘The little Scotchman is quite right—we have not got a really good British government so long as the Executive and Legislative Councils can do what they choose without any regard to the Assembly.’ ”

“Why didn’t you tell him all?”

“I don’t want to worry him.”

“But you might get his advice. Every one says father was a good soldier when he had to fight; but he doesn’t believe in force till everything else has been tried.”

“Nor I, Peggy; only he has more hope in the wisdom and justice of our British rulers than—Mr. Mackenzie has.” Then he added hastily, “I don’t think you quite understand my position, Peggy. I hope father is right and sometimes I believe he is; and why should I worry him till my own mind is made up?”

Peggy was beginning to fire off a whole battery of new arguments when Robin joined them, anxious to display his latest scholastic achievement; and Jim seized the opportunity to escape.

The stipulated month was lengthened to five weeks before the Lydgate Academy took its Christmas holidays. But let no one suppose Miss Crane rested even then from her labours. She kept her hand in, as teacher, by instructing her sister-in-law in the various pioneer industries, about which she had been picking up information from the Lydgates; and early in the New Year she returned to her work, “as resident governess”, with fresh and quite alarming zest.

All through that strenuous winter, the school-work went steadily forward and so did the polishing of the “young colonists’ ” manners, though with something less of severity than in the first month. In fact as the time for her departure drew near it became increasingly evident that Miss Crane was proud of her pupils, though possibly not entirely satisfied with the gentility of their behaviour and the thoroughness of their grounding.

One element in the situation—the stipulated exchange of work—oppressed both John and Peggy, for their instructress would not give any of her pupils leave of absence even for a week, lest the dreaded cousin should arrive before they were ready for him. Jim, chief purveyor of game for the family, insisted that he must hunt as usual or they would all be hungry; and Peggy feared that he sometimes played truant with less excuse, especially when that strange man, Mackenzie, was in the neighbourhood. However, he managed, by sheer audacity, to make his peace with Miss Crane, and incidentally he paid some portion of “the remuneration” due to her, by keeping her brother’s small household pretty well supplied with wild meat.

That winter, when learning and literature took precedence of all other interests, was unique in the annals of the Lydgate family. Repairs on the farm implements were delayed till spring; the knitting and spinning industries suffered; and the making of quilts and mats came to a standstill.

But the first time Mrs. Lydgate was able to take the charred old Bible and read to her husband his favourite chapter—Luke the fifteenth—she said “There’s never been a year since the fire that we have been so behindhand with every kind of work; but this is worth it, isn’t it, Lesley?”

“My dear, it would be worth it if we all had to go in rags and patches for a twelvemonth.”

“For years I’ve been sad; yes, and ashamed, that I couldn’t even spell out a few verses; but I never dreamed, Lesley, that it was possible to learn—at my age.”

“Thirty-nine! Why, Mary, it may easily be that there is half your life before you yet. It was a fine thing for the children, your learning with them.”

“Fine?—I don’t know about that. At any rate, it was funny,” murmured Mrs. Lydgate with a low laugh. “There was Robin—he’s as sharp as a needle, Lesley—and he wanted to give everybody lifts, but Arthur and Bertram felt he was putting on airs—he was, too—so I had to let him help me; and between him and Miss Crane, I promise you, I’ve been well tutored, though I’m not the prize scholar.”

“Who is?”

“Miss Crane would say, ‘Jim’—saucy youngster that he is; but I think you would have given the prize to John, for it has astonished even his mother how he has toiled and worked over spelling bits of words and writing his copy, though it’s all of a piece with the way he set himself to get a roof over our heads after the fire. Perhaps John isn’t so clever as some; but he’s good, father, good all through.”

“That he is. And how does Peggy get on?”

“Peggy?” and again Mrs. Lydgate laughed. “Oh, Peggy has been just her old self—always in a violent hurry to make Miss Crane teach her the things she wanted and disheartened when— Well, Lesley, you know the remarks Miss Crane makes at table. She’s spoiled poor Peggy’s dinner many a time this winter, but now that it’s all over the child’s almost heartbroken that she’s going to-morrow. I think Lesley, we’ll have to spare the lassie for two or three weeks to help to pay our governess for all she’s done. Miss Crane is a wonder when it comes to teaching. Why, it’s only six months since those children came in singing and shouting with their ‘Talisman’.”

The Lydgates were now nearing the end of that famous story, but the perusal of the third volume was achieved—not by Peggy alone—but by all the readers in the family under the stern supervision of Miss Crane. She would have none of Mr. Lydgate’s happy-go-lucky methods of leaping at half-spelled words, but insisted on the unfortunate reader’s struggling to the pronunciation of some awe-inspiring polysyllable by his own scarcely-aided labour of dividing the monster joint by joint. To make matters worse, a particularly choice or imposing monster sometimes threw the teacher into a kind of fury of instructive energy, and she would then and there turn the evening’s recreation into a general drill on some such slippery word as “particularly” or “preliminaries”. John especially dreaded the public exposure of his nervousness in the face of a long word, but, in the eyes of his task-mistress, this was but an excellent reason for giving him extra attention.

On more than one occasion Steve Bennett hinted his dissatisfaction when the flowing stream of the “Great Magician’s” romance lost itself in a morass of verbal niceties; nevertheless it was not Steve’s growling but Robin’s delicate attempt to soothe the old man that saved the last two chapters of the book from these galling interruptions. “Never mind, Steve,” this most irrepressible of Miss Crane’s pupils was heard to whisper, in the pauses of his eldest brother’s anguished endeavours to get a grip on a set of such outlandish weapons as “scimitars and poniards”—“Never mind, Steve, this school has to shut up in two days from now, and there’ll be nights and nights and nights of real reading after that.”

Miss Crane’s pale cheeks grew pink, and Mrs. Lydgate suddenly discovered that it was “bedtime for everybody”; but again Ellen showed herself a good sport, for after studying the problem for some sleepless hours in the night she decided that, as it was both impossible and undesirable to overlook such glaring errors as all the Lydgates were still prone to make at times, she would cut the knot by giving the readings for the last two nights herself. And give them she did, in her best and most dramatic style, earning for her reward a loud “Well done!” from Stephen, who added generously “That’s fine, Miss. ’Pon my word, you make that old tale grip one nearly the same as Peggy does.”

Once more Miss Crane’s cheeks flushed, as she wondered whether there really was anything in Steve’s implication—that after all her painstaking study of elocution, this almost untaught child of the woods should surpass her in the art of reading. She considered the question anxiously and, she believed, dispassionately, and decided that she must be the better reader.

Yet she was wrong, for, despite her conscientious and self-conscious labour for the perfection of correctness in all she read, she never quite attained to letting herself go in response to the moods of her author, while Peggy’s single-hearted and imaginative enjoyment of the story re-acted on her hearers and brought them too into eager sympathy with the great master.

It was curious, by the way, that Ellen never felt the spell of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”, till she heard Peggy read it, and then she was far from realizing how much she owed to the glowing enthusiasm of the girl, who still possessed only the merest rudiments of an ordinary education.

NOT A DAY TOO SOON.

The day after the last reading in “The Talisman”, John and Peggy took Miss Crane home, and lucky it was that their vehicle was drawn by the sturdy, unexcitable oxen instead of horses, for a thaw was in progress, and the roads were almost impassable, though likely to be worse before they were better.

Nevertheless, in spite of the battering and the shaking incident to the journey, they were taking back a very different and a much younger Miss Crane than the woe-begone creature who had opened the Lydgate Academy in November. Hatred of the country was no longer her dominant thought.

A gladder and a wiser woman, she was so conscious of battles fought and victories won, that though no one could have suspected it, the humble ox-wagon was to her a very car of triumph. She knew that Peggy and her family could now face the dreaded relations without fear of humiliation, and deep in her heart she treasured the thought of Mr. and Mrs. Lydgate’s joy in the fact that the latter had been enabled to enter with her children into the new avenue to intellectual life. Ellen, who had never known her parents and had spent her childhood in the repressive atmosphere of an old-fashioned boarding-school, had learned in these months what the word “mother” really stands for, and having in her odd, silent, undemonstrative fashion almost adopted Mrs. Lydgate as her mother, she was glad, with all her heart, to think that she had been able to do her so great a service. And they had said too, that she had re-opened to the blind man (who was so brave and cheerful that she was unaccustomed to think of him as a subject for pity) the world of books, where he was so happily at home.

The wheels on Miss Crane’s side of the wagon plunged suddenly into mud to their very hubs. Peggy threw her arm about her friend to prevent her being pitched head first from the vehicle, John righted it with difficulty, but Miss Crane herself only turned a slightly surprised but supremely happy face towards her companions, and looked as if she saw a vision.

But she was very much awake and excited when her brother reported that there was another letter for Mr. Lydgate from his cousin, lying at the Post Office.

On their homeward way, the brother and sister again held anxious consultation as to how that letter was to be paid for. Fortunately there came a change of weather. A sharp frost hardened the roads. A snow storm gave another week’s good sleighing and John hurried in a load of cordwood to Oakville and from the proceeds paid for the letter and bought needles, thread and buttons, the lack of which had sorely hindered his mother in her belated mending and making operations.

The arrival of this second letter was as exciting as that of the first. The hopes of the family ran high that amongst them they would be able to decipher it; but it was the first time that their new learning had been put to this particular test, and hearts beat rapidly with hope and fear, as Mr. Lydgate said, “Who’s to read it?”

Self-confident Robin was beginning, “Let me,” when, catching sight of his sister’s flushed, eager face, he joined zealously in the chorus of “Peggy, Peggy!”

“Yes, it’s Peggy’s due,” struck in Jim. “Hurrah for the founder—I beg Miss Crane’s pardon—foundress of the Lydgate Academy!”

But, when the joyful noise ceased, Peggy’s eyes were dim and the words seemed to dance before her eyes.

At last she began breathlessly, “My dear Lesley: Please accept my thanks for your most interesting reply to my former letter. There have been many unavoidable delays in our departure from England, and we do not yet know when we shall be able to sail, but, with good fortune, we shall arrive in Toronto some time during August. I fear my new duties may prevent our visiting you as soon as we could wish, but rest assured we shall be delighted to accept your kind invitation at the earliest possible moment.”

So far Peggy got without a break, and, when she stuck fast a little in the affectionate messages and apologies for haste at the close, Jim, on one side, and Robin, on the other, eagerly prompted her.

“Now mother is going to read it again,” said Mr. Lydgate, and to the delight of all, “Mother” read it in fine style, and they all clapped and congratulated her, as if she were a prima donna, making her first appearance.

“Who’s afraid of disgracing the classical cousins now?” demanded Jim. “Mother, you’re just splendid!”

“But,” said Peggy, thinking of the Academy, “we have not been a day too soon in getting ready for them.”

“My dear, we are not ready for them,” answered her mother, whose mind had turned to the preparations a good housekeeper would naturally wish to make in such a case.

Of course the evening readings had to be deferred while the family bent its energies to the impossible task of “making up for lost time,” with the sense upon them all of the hundred and one things to be done, if the cousins were to be received with due hospitality and respect. Mr. Lydgate re-seated any of the old splint-bottomed chairs that showed signs of wear. John prepared additional ground for vegetables. Robin sowed flower seeds (begged from the neighbours) in odd and unexpected places; and Peggy showed new enthusiasm for patching and darning in spare minutes after she had helped her brothers for hours in the field work.

The debt of labour to their teacher kept them short-handed through that busy spring and early summer (Jim, Tom, Peggy and John successively working for the Cranes), but owing to the fact that the Lydgates could press the oxen, Buck and Bright, into the service, the debt was paid by midsummer.

It was gratifying that Mr. Crane plainly realized that the assistance of such “experienced Canadians” was of inestimable benefit; and it was funny that, when his neighbours discovered his willingness to learn from mere boys like the Lydgates, they wondered why they had thought him “stuck-up”.

“You might just as well call a deer stuck-up just because it don’t know how to talk to you,” said Tobin. “Cranes are shy birds as every one knows,” and he laughed loudly at his own joke.

Miss Crane kept aloof from the young people of her own age after her brother and his wife began to meet their late detractors’ advances more than half way, but they were not quite so convinced as formerly that she hated the new country.

In truth, though she hardly knew it herself, she was beginning to love Canada. It stood to her now for the most delightful, eager and interesting pupils she had ever had the happiness to teach; and it was giving her the joy, in a strange unexpected way, of being a help to her brother, instead of the burden she had been during her dreary school-days, when she was just starting out in life. Debts incurred for her education had delayed his marriage; and ever since she had allowed herself to be “over-persuaded” and had accompanied James and Milly to their new home in the wilderness she had been painfully convinced that she had shirked her duty and was again a weight upon her brother’s back. It was this that had made her feel so bitterly her inefficiency in the tasks that belonged to the new life.

When she returned to teaching she was again mistress of herself and her work. And she did not quite give it up, when she left the Lydgates. She made a surreptitious effort to convey useful knowledge to whichever member of the family happened to be with them, working out the debt.

It was a very joyful day when her brother said, after he had been running over the many little helpful things he had learned from the Lydgates, “Nelly, you’ve often said I gave you your start in life, and I suppose it is true in a sense; but I wonder if you realize that ‘your changing work with the Lydgates’, is giving me my start in Canadian life and probably saving me from disaster.”

Ellen was a dumb creature even with him. She just squeezed his hand and looked as if a great wave of light had swept over her. He understood and went on in his even voice, with a whimsical twist of his thin lips, “I suppose there’s much to learn yet, but I have got so far that it’s no longer surprising to me that these old farmers thought me a marvel of greenness when I could squeeze such a number of blunders into some simple thing like getting out a load of wood or hoeing a patch of potatoes.”

“Now, James, don’t be too hard on yourself. Even farming doesn’t come to a man by nature,” laughed Mrs. Crane.

“Even farming? Milly, I’ve just given up saying ‘even farming’, for one might as wisely say even law, or even manufacturing, or even seamanship, doesn’t come by nature.”

Mrs. Crane nodded her bright little head and replied, not in the least abashed, “I always knew you’d fit in with this life, if you had a chance. Tobin, the shoemaker, told me that people have begun to say, ‘All Mr. Crane’s stiffness is in his looks’. How do you like that for a compliment, James?” Then she put her arm round Ellen’s neck and said, “James is right; you have saved the situation, I do believe, my dear.”

Busy as they were, the Cranes and Lydgates met pretty frequently, and were thankful that they were near neighbours, whenever they could wade the Creek or cross it on a fallen tree. Occasionally when John was taking the oxen to the Low place, Mr. Lydgate went with him, perhaps to mend a chair, certainly to exchange ideas with his host on British politics or some other congenial subject; and often one of the ladies read to him from some poem or article only four or five months old.

Midsummer was past, when news came from Robert Lydgate that he and his family were sailing for Quebec one week from the date of his letter, but that gave little idea when they would arrive, for, though the Royal William steamship had made its famous pioneer voyage across the Atlantic in 1833, the regular ocean traffic was still carried on by sailing vessels, and either calms or contrary winds might lengthen out a voyage by many weeks.

There were many days of suspense, during which the Lydgates laboured gallantly to get all in readiness to receive their distinguished guests whenever it should suit them to come. At last early in August came word that the travellers had landed at Quebec.

The Lydgates were at supper when the letter arrived and Peggy glancing over the first page, summarized its contents with rapidity enough to satisfy even her impatient audience. She turned the leaf, uttered an exclamation, laughed excitedly and began, “Oh, father. Oh, father! I am so glad. Here’s the most wonderful piece of news for you and for us all.”

Then she stopped, for it flashed into her mind that even the most joyful tidings must not be told incautiously. But it was terribly trying to her hearers, for though she talked of glad news, her voice had taken on a strange note of solemnity.

She glanced at her father. His face was white. His hands were trembling. Her mother on one side, Jim on the other, pressed close to look over her shoulder.

“Go on, Peggy,” said Jim. “Be quick. It’s not fair to keep father waiting.”

Mrs. Lydgate interposed, taking a hand in the breaking of the news. “Lesley, dear Lesley, who is it that you want most to see in all the world? Who have you been longing to see again since—”

“Father, Granny’s at Quebec,” said Jim, putting his strong, young arm round his father’s thin shoulders.

“And she sends her love,” cried Peggy, “and she’ll come to Oakville by the Queen Adelaide, and we shall have her here—we ought to have her here—in ten days.”

The children were breaking into wild demonstrations of delight, shouting, “Granny! Granny!” but their mother stilled them with a glance at her husband, saying, “Give me the letter, and go, dears, all of you. Father must hear it all first. Then I’ll call you in or bring it to you.”

They went out soberly, crossed the sun-baked clearing without a word; but broke loose as they plunged into the wood, all (except quiet John) saying or doing something mad to work off their excitement. Tom walked about on his hands, Arthur swung, like a monkey, head downwards, from a convenient branch, Robin cheered for “Granny”, and Jim and Peggy tried, both at once, to tell what they had seen in the letter.

A call from their father started a stampede back to the house, but a glance at his face awed them and they felt as if they had rushed tumultuously into church. “Children, God is sending me a joy I never expected to have in this world. Let us give Him thanks,” he said slowly.

“Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” rang out Mrs. Lydgate’s sweet true voice, and the children sang the old doxology as they had never sung it before.

But after that “the house resolved itself into a committee of ways and means.” They were delighted to think that there was Peggy’s pretty bedroom all but ready for the old lady; but there was another very important matter to consider. Cousin Robert had asked that some one would arrange to be at the wharf in Toronto, when the Queen Adelaide came in, as it would be impossible for him to come on with his aunt, until he had made certain arrangements with the authorities of Upper Canada College and had settled his family at least temporarily. He added that if anything prevented their meeting the boat on its arrival, he would take Mrs. Lydgate to his new home, to await their coming.

After anxious discussion it was decided that Peggy and one of the elder boys should go up to Toronto at least a day before the boat was due. That was soon settled; but it was not so clear how the adventure was to be accomplished, for as usual there was practically no money in the family treasury; and it was generally agreed that they could not go to Toronto (that great city of ten or twelve thousand inhabitants, where they were almost unknown), without at least a few shillings in their purses.

Peggy fell back on the old adage that has carried many a persevering pilgrim past the lions of doubt and difficulty, “Where there’s a will there’s a way”. But when Jim demanded explanations, she was fain to admit that “She could not yet see the way. She just knew there must be one.”

PEGGY IN FAIRYLAND.

Once more the will and the way proved coincident in human history, though it must be admitted that the said will owed much of its ultimate triumph to the active sympathy of the Lydgates’ neighbours—counted in the liberal bush fashion of estimating neighbours, most liberal when any one is in distress or in need of definite help.

Men had come six or eight miles to have a hand in the rebuilding of Lesley Lydgate’s house after the fire; and now, when the strange story went through the settlements that his mother had crossed the ocean to visit him, the people who heard began immediately to consider how “those folk were going to make the old lady comfortable”. Pessimists shook their heads and declared that it could not be done. “No woman old enough to be Lesley Lydgate’s mother—with her bringing-up—” (sometimes they took things for granted) “could be expected to settle down on a bush farm, boiling over with noisy boys!”

Optimists clung to the settling effect of Peggy’s dainty “blue bedroom where that pernicketty English school teacher” had been content for five months, and reminded themselves (and others) that the Lydgates were not the wild young colts they had been before Ellen Crane had had the taming of them. However, no outsider could possibly derive as much satisfaction from this view of the matter as the young colts themselves.

“To think,” said Peggy, “that I got so mad when Ellen” (by request she now called her former preceptress by her Christian name) “when Ellen told me that my hair was rough, or that I handled my table-fork like a pitchfork! Father, what will Granny think of us all?” but she propounded the old question with a not-too-timorous smile.

The neighbours passed from the consideration of the Lydgates’ manners to that of their clothes and their resources in general, and then they further debated what they could do to help. Amongst them, they discovered that they could do a good many little things. For instance, the proprietor of the Blue Boar ordered a load of hay; the master of the Oakville House Hotel did the same; whilst the minister bought the berries which the small boys picked, as their contribution to the family funds.

Mrs. Simon Hurd discovered in her stores a dress-length of wonderful green gingham, relieved with narrow pink and white stripes. Mrs. Crane (generally regarded as the most fashionable woman in the township) undertook to make it, and in the consultations over patterns and furbelows, the two became fast friends. Ellen Crane, meanwhile, unearthed a fine straw bonnet, trimmed with white ribbon and pink roses, and insisted that Peggy must wear it when she went up to meet her grandmother, for “First impressions count for so much, Peggy, and the elder Mrs. Lydgate will be proud to have you claim her in that bonnet. Dear old James! he picked it out for me to wear at his wedding, but it’s not my style at all. You look lovely in it.”

“It’s fine enough for her young Majesty, Queen Victoria herself, and you’re a darling to want me to wear it, but I’m afraid if I do, Ellen, my head and my feet won’t match.” (Poor Peggy, she was always in trouble about her shoes.) “Look at this!” and she stood on one foot and lifted up the other for inspection. “We’re very weak on shoes in our family just now. John’s are the best and he is most anxious to lend them to me, but I’d have to tie them on with rope, or pink ribbons. Jim’s are not too bad and they are nearer my size, but he is going with me to meet Granny, and his best clothes are so shabby, he’s trusting to his shoes to give him an air. His are bought shoes. He got them at Oakville. Jonas had nothing to do with them. Jim chopped the price of them out in wood two winters ago, and he says they have been worth the work he put into them over and over, for when he gets them on he can stand up to any one.”

The end of it was that Tobin, who was working that week on the next farm to the Hurds’, surpassed himself and made such an artistic job of patching Peggy’s shoes that, it was generally conceded, “the uppers just appeared to have a neat pattern on them.” He took them back to Mrs. Hurd’s on a day when Mrs. Crane had gone with Peggy to display the finished dress, and Tobin saw her in all the glory of her gay, full-skirted gown, and the rose-trimmed bonnet which shaded a face “pretty as a picture”. Tobin’s eyes travelled slowly from her head to her feet, and at the sight of his own artistic handiwork he broke into a smile, and said, “You’ll do, Peggy, if you’ll only keep them shoes out of the mud. A woman who keeps her feet nice won’t go far wrong with her head.”

They all laughed, while Mrs. Crane turned her this way and that, putting little finishing touches to her work. “There, Peggy,” she said at last, “that’s the best I can do for you, but—I wish I was always as well satisfied with what I’ve had a hand in.”

Peggy stooped and kissed the little lady, but added doubtfully, “Father has so often said, all my life, ‘What would Granny think of you?’ that it makes me a little afraid.”

“You are fishing for compliments, Peggy,” laughed Mrs. Hurd, but it took the outspoken admiration of her brothers, when she put on all her finery for the family to see that night, to overcome her nervousness. It was only when her blind father joined in the talk in his usual cheerful fashion, and then made her go to him so that he could see with his hands what her dress and bonnet were like, that the girl’s new garments seemed to take their rightful place in her mind.

While Peggy was at Mrs. Hurd’s, the minister had brought a pressing invitation from a rich old aunt of his own that Peggy should stay with her while in Toronto, and, as Frank had offered Jim a share of his bed in his grandfather’s house, this was another difficulty straightened out and hotel charges would not need to be reckoned for in the estimate of expenses.

Peggy’s new clothes and a few other necessaries were carefully packed in a couple of baskets, while a brown-checked dress for the journey and a shady hat, for which her father had plaited the straw, were laid in readiness over-night for the start on their great adventure in the cool of the dawn.

It had been decided that John was to take them part way in the ox-wagon, and he would gladly have gone all the way to bring the old lady home, but it was feared that neither the classical master, nor Granny herself might like to be met in the city by such a humble vehicle, especially when the cousins would have their lives to live amongst the city folk. And there was the stronger objection that, whatever Granny herself might think, a drive of over twenty miles, in such a rude conveyance, on roads that must to her appear very rough, was too severe an ordeal for a woman of her age.

Despite their grandeur and the importance of their mission, both Jim and Peggy enjoyed the jolting ride in what the former called “the old family coach”. The weather was fair, the road at its best, and the oxen made good time—for oxen!

Before John turned back, the three picnicked in a shady spot, beside a clear little spring, and the two adventurers were so excited that, as their brother was leaving them, they called one message after another to the folk at home, as if they were going out into the world with small hope of return.

“We are two silly people,” muttered Jim, after they had thus stopped Buck and Bright’s progress a second and a third time. “Where do we really suppose we are going? Not five-and-twenty miles from home.”

“Five-and-twenty miles, as the oxen might count it, but I feel it in my bones, Jim, it’s different with us. You and I are bound, like old Christopher Columbus, for a new world. We shall be different people when we next pass along this road. We shall know things we only guess at now.”

“Don’t be so solemn, Peggy,” said Jim, impatiently. “It won’t hurt us if we do know a little more. We get our knowledge pretty slowly.” Then he laughed and lowered his voice, “Perhaps I sympathize too much with Mother Eve.”

Peggy did not laugh. She frowned. “Why do we ache so to know things? John’s not like that.”

“John has lots of sense, if he isn’t clever,” replied Jim aggressively.

Peggy did not answer, though she had a warm admiration for her eldest brother, and presently Jim said quietly, “I hope you won’t be disappointed, Peggy. Toronto is not such a very wonderful place, even though it is a city. However, if we mean to get there to-night, we must be moving.”

Peggy rose, shook out her dress, took the basket that contained Miss Crane’s best bonnet and began to plod along the dusty road. But they were lucky that day. They had not walked more than a mile when they heard behind them a mighty bumping and grinding of wheels. Turning, they beheld the red coach and scrambled up the bank with the intention of letting it go by.

Dimsdale recognized and hailed them. “There’s lots of room inside to-day.” (The coach was empty except for two men in the outside seats behind the driver.) “What do you say to a lift?”

Peggy’s eyes glistened. “I’d give anything to ride in the coach, if only for the sake of telling Robin about it. Dare we?”

“I think he means us to ride free, but we’re not beggars,” and Jim slapped the pocket which his mother had sewn inside his shirt, not intending that he should betray its location by jingling its contents.

“Oh, Jim, do be careful. Suppose people heard—they might rob you. What is Pete saying?”

“Hurry along, young ones, if you’re coming,” cried the mail-driver.

With one impulse they ran to the coach. “What is your fare to Toronto?” called Jim to the potentate on the box.

“Nothing to you to-day,” answered Dimsdale. “I’ll make that all right. Climb in, Miss Peggy. Perhaps you’d like to sit up here with me, Jim.”

Peggy would have loved to climb to that commanding height also, but since riding at all was by favour, she allowed Jim to bestow her baskets inside and followed them as directed. The lumbering contrivance started with a bang and a rattle and Peggy gave herself up to extracting the fullest possible amount of enjoyment out of this most unexpected happening. She tried each of the nine seats in turn and managed to get more exertion out of the ride than would have been involved in walking half-a-dozen miles at her own pace. She wanted to see everything and was continually flying from one side of the vehicle to the other. And if she had wished to be still she could not have accomplished it, for Dimsdale and his team were bent on making good time home. The load was light, the horses tore along the dry, hard, bumpy road, regardless of the holes into which they pitched, the stumps over which they jerked, and the pace kept the heavy body of the vehicle rocking on its bed of tough leather straps, like a boat on a rough sea. Consequently the solitary inside passenger was tossed hither and thither, despite her efforts to brace herself with hands and feet. But the only thing she did not like, as she told Robin afterwards, was when the red coach seemed to think it was the frying pan and she the pancake, and so tried to toss her up to the roof. “Once or twice,” she explained, “I did hear my head knock against the top, but it did not hurt very badly, and it was a glorious ride!”

And it had a delightful ending. When the coach drew up at Scarlett’s Hotel, Toronto, with a blast on the horn that brought the guests running to the doors and windows, who should they see but young Frank Hurd, smiling and bowing to Peggy so ceremoniously that she felt suddenly very much grown up indeed and, though considerably dishevelled by her fierce ride, descended from the coach with impressive dignity, leaving the boys to attend to the safety of the precious baskets.

But Jim cast dignity to the winds in his delight at meeting a friend at the moment of their arrival. “How did you divine that we would be on this coach?” he asked.

“How else were you likely to come?” inquired Frank.

“We started with John in the ox-wagon and intended to walk the last few miles, but Pete gave us a lift,” explained Peggy, while Frank gazed at her eager face as if it were a delightful picture. He also glanced furtively at her feet, then looked a little guilty as he met her eyes.

“Yes, Mr. Hurd, I have come in my shoes, as I promised,” said Peggy mischievously.

“Hush,” said Jim, “all the girls here are wearing shoes. You need not be so proud of yours, in spite of Tobin’s fancy patches.”

Frank looked a little uncomfortable, for he was sensitive, as the young usually are in such circumstances, both as to the apparel and the behaviour of his friends. But, if Peggy’s brown check could not compete with the sprigged muslins of the young ladies who were taking their afternoon promenade, she suddenly remembered her deportment and assumed a lofty serenity of manner, calculated to overawe the city girls who were showing such unaffected interest in their proceedings.

“If it would not be too much trouble, Frank,” she said, “I should be very glad if you would show us the way to Mrs. Whitby’s.”

“Certainly,” said Frank, seizing upon one of the baskets, though wishing that the bonnet it contained was better concealed, for the carefully arranged coverings had broken from their moorings in that last mad ride in the coach. Jim carried the other basket, and Peggy marched between her cavaliers with her head held high, thinking it was odd that a strange place should make an old friend seem like a stranger.

Happily that did not last. Frank soon plunged into a merry description of the old lady, who was taking Peggy under her wing for the night. “She is very anxious to meet your grandmother,” he concluded. “She is amazed at her courage in facing such a voyage to see you all.”

“Father always said she was brave,” answered Peggy, “but she loves him so, I suppose when she saw the chance to come, she didn’t care whether she was afraid of the sea or not.”

“Grandmother wants to see her too, but, Peggy, I’ve got a fine plan for to-night. If Mrs. Whitby will let you come, Jim and I will call for you after supper and show you all the sights of the town.”

Jim approved of this proposal emphatically, but Peggy’s spirits were low, for at this first glimpse the much-talked-of city was disappointing, and she herself felt like a poor little fish out of water.

Things were not much better when rich, kindly, whimsical Mrs. Whitby took her and her two baskets into a big, cool bedroom, which contained a most astonishing bed with four tall posts at its corners, supporting a great canopy from which hung an elaborate array of green curtains and valances, lined with pink.

As Peggy walked round this imposing piece of furniture, towards the open window, she started to see a dusty-looking brown gipsy of a girl advancing towards her, but the corresponding start of the dishevelled creature before her brought the realization that it was just her own image in a mirror. And such a mirror! “Actually it was as tall as father!” It stood on four outspread claw feet, and “it showed you yourself from your hat to your shoes at one swoop.” Peggy’s own particular mirror measured perhaps four inches by six.

Mrs. Whitby went away, telling her that supper would be ready in twenty minutes, and Peggy washed off the dust of the journey. Then she began to comb out her abundant, beautiful hair, and the mirror became really friendly and helped the stranger to make quite the most fascinating top-knot she had ever achieved. It became almost flattering when Peggy put the brown check out of sight in a huge closet and slipped on the green gingham. And it was nicest of all, when supper was over and Frank had come back, driving the spirited Beauty in a small light carriage, for then Peggy had to tie on the bonnet that had been a feature of pretty Mrs. Crane’s wedding. The mirror told her that it really was a most charming bonnet, while the face it framed looked back out of the looking-glass with merry, laughing eyes, and once again Peggy wondered, “What will Granny think?”

Neither Jim nor Frank left her in doubt as to what they thought. Jim whistled and exclaimed, “What a fine lady! Will your Royal Highness permit your poor brother to accompany you?”

“Don’t worry, Jim,” said Frank. “No one will give either of us a glance when they can look at Peggy in that fetching bonnet.”

It was a glorious evening, and, Peggy, happily forgetful of her earlier disappointment and her borrowed bonnet, saw everything under a glamour—perhaps that of the sunset—and felt as if the lively little horse, eager to pass everything on the road, had wings and that they three were in fairyland.

In his wish to show them everything, Frank drove out first to the Old Fort, then back along Front Street to a group of red-brick buildings, which Peggy studied with special attention, because Frank said they were the Parliament Buildings and Government offices and she wanted to tell her father all about them. She liked the green open space and the view of the waterfront, with its three or four wharves stretched out like long, pointing fingers, and the Island (really a peninsula, Frank said) with groups of small trees on its low shores, and the stone lighthouse marking its point. Frank grew eloquent concerning the number of wild fowl which disported themselves in its marshes and added, “We will come down again to the beach when it is dark, and then you’ll think it pretty, for all along its shore the fishermen will be out with their red lights, to lure the bass within their reach.”

After this, they went so fast and dashed round so many corners that Peggy grew confused as to the names of the streets and buildings. Yet some stood out clearly in her memory, like the five square, two-storey, red-brick buildings of Upper Canada College on King Street, making Peggy think of a hen and chickens, for “the College” itself was much larger than the masters’ houses, though built on the same general design. It gave Peggy a thrill to think that a Lydgate would soon be at home in one of those august dwellings and that a day might come when she would visit there.

Frank darted up York Street, saying, “Now I’ll show you the house Mackenzie lives in, who gave you the ‘keepsake’, you know.” Next he turned along Adelaide Street, thinking “Jim would like to have a look at Doel’s Brewery, where those who sympathized with the disaffected in Lower Canada, had held several meetings.” It pleased Peggy that Jim showed no great enthusiasm over the big, plain frame building.

But he had many questions to ask when they reached the point where King and Church Streets crossed, surely the very heart of the city. Close to the spot stood the solid-looking brick Jail (its yard grimly fenced in with pickets fifteen feet high), the Court House, with the old stocks (last used about three years earlier), almost under its shadow, the Firehall, with its cupola, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and St. James’s, the Anglican place of worship recently re-built of stone, but having at that time neither tower nor steeple, and the Market House, a building which, with its roofs of different heights and great rounded archways, seen against the background of blue water, appealed to Peggy immensely.

But Frank had many things to show them still. He whisked them right out of the town, a mile up Yonge Street, to the toll-gate above Davenport Road, so that they might try what fine driving it was on the macadamized highway, and then he took them back to see the gaiety of the streets when the shops were lighted up for the evening trade; and the young people from the country had the joy of gazing into the windows of bookshops and druggist’s shops—in 1837 Toronto boasted two of each—and of many shops where people could buy common everyday things to eat and things to wear.

Here and there, on that wonderful sight-seeing expedition, they had passed many-chimneyed, many-windowed houses where the rich men lived, and had caught glimpses of some of them—Frank muttered their names under his breath—enjoying themselves in their pleasant gardens with their wives and children. The owners of two houses, by the way, were actually not satisfied to have a wealth of flowers in the summer time, but had built glass rooms, called conservatories, so that they could have flowers blooming all the winter. But the house Peggy liked best of all was the pretty, low, white cottage, where Frank lived with his grandparents, for it looked out on the Bay, across its flowery garden, and it had a long verandah, which Peggy thought most charming.

“I never knew before how much money could do,” she sighed, but it was not an unhappy sigh. “We shall have to talk for a week, Jim, to tell them all at home, what we have seen to-night,” adding suddenly, “I suppose we ought to go back to Mrs. Whitby’s this very minute. She told us not to be late, but, Frank”, Peggy’s tone was ingratiating, “how long would it take to drive just once down King Street? I should like to see the crowds again and the shops all lighted up. Aren’t the lamps they use here just grand, Jim?”

Frank gladly complied with Peggy’s request, and almost in silence they drove up the busy street and down again. “Now,” said Peggy, with another sigh of deep satisfaction, “we must go back. But we shall remember this all our lives, Frank.”

HOW JIM WENT TO MARKET.

The next morning Jim and Peggy went to see the Market, which was close to the wharf where the mail steamers from Montreal came in.

Of course Peggy was attired in all her finery. Happily the day was fine, thus, to her great relief, the borrowed bonnet was in no danger of damage unless from the dust raised by the traffic on the ill-made streets.

Already, after the drive of the previous evening, both brother and sister had a sense of familiarity with the central part of the town and found their way to the Market House without any difficulty. Passing through the archway into the hall where the buying and selling took place it struck them both as very curious and very interesting, for all round its four sides ran a gallery above the stalls of the butchers and other salesmen.

“Look, Jim, what a place to see from!” exclaimed Peggy, “let us go up.” Jim agreed, and for many minutes they stood looking down from the gallery upon the busy scene below, perfectly fascinated with its colour and life and movement. It occurred to Jim at last, however, that people were beginning to gaze back at them, and he said, “We must go down.”

Peggy followed him, in silent wonderment at the restless throngs, the dresses of the ladies, the amazing display of poultry, the huge baskets of eggs, pats of golden butter, bunches of flowers, berries, puppies, cheese, cakes, woollen socks—in all of which the farmers or their wives and daughters seemed to be doing a roaring trade.

Peggy looked longingly, with thoughts of Robin and the other small boys, at a stall where red-coated monkeys on sticks and other delightful toys were for sale, but the money, that must not be allowed to jingle in Jim’s secret pocket, was a sacred trust, not to be spent for any private indulgence even the delight of giving.

“Doesn’t this make you wish you were rolling in money?” she whispered. “I like it even better than the grand shops—except the bookshops. The people look as if they found it fun—at least some do.”

“Not all,” Jim said. “Look at that anxious old lady. I don’t believe—” but he did not finish his sentence, for a hand was laid on his arm and Frank’s voice said cheerily, “Grandfather has given me a holiday, and I’ve been chasing you for the last half hour. This market is quite a sight, isn’t it? But, Peggy”—he glanced over his shoulder and dropped his voice—“I believe you said once that you’d like to see the man again who threw the book.”

“Yes, I did,” answered the girl, wishing when she glanced at her brother that she had never expressed a desire so rash.

“Well, now’s your chance. He’s on a wagon, haranguing the folk outside. Let us make haste. We can come back here, if you want to.”

He offered his arm to Peggy (as was then the fashion) with a bow and a smile, pushed a way hurriedly through the crowd, leaving Jim to follow, and took up a position just outside the building on the Church Street side. “We can see and hear famously from here, and you wouldn’t want to be in the thick of the mob,” he said.

“No, thank you, it’s better here,” replied the girl, watching intently the little slight figure mounted on a wagon from which the horses had been taken out. The voice of the orator, who was gesticulating wildly, was frequently drowned by the cheers or groans of his audience, but presently Peggy caught the words, “Slavery! . . . Robbers! . . . Tyrants!” followed by a torrent of hot denunciations of those who heaped up treasures of wickedness, ground the faces of the poor and kept desolate for the sake of gain land which might support thousands.

“Ay, ay!” shouted one. “Down with the Clergy Reserves and the tyrants who uphold them.”

The speaker seized on the word, “Clergy Reserves”, and in an argumentative tone, he tried to persuade his hearers that something must be done to bring these huge blocks of wild land into use. For a few moments he spoke quietly, but as he referred to the burdens and abuses which added so much to the hardships of life in the new land, his voice began to rise like a stormy wind and suddenly he was heaping the most opprobrious epithets upon the heads of all connected with the government of Upper Canada.

Peggy’s cheek flushed. Her eyes sparkled. “Is there no one to answer him?” she cried. “Surely, surely it cannot be that the Government is as bad as he says? ‘Thieves and vampires!’ What is a vampire, Frank?”

“A treacherous, blood-sucking creature.”

Peggy hardly heard the reply, for she suddenly perceived that Jim had made his way through the thick of the crowd into the very front, and was standing holding on to the wagon almost at Mackenzie’s feet. He had to throw back his head to look up into the speaker’s excited face, and his sister was grieved to see how eagerly he appeared to be drinking in every word.

“Give me liberty or give me death!” shrieked Mackenzie, quoting, though half his audience did not know it, one of the famous catchwords of the American Revolution. “Without liberty life is worthless; but our rulers are determined to enslave us.”

“Why doesn’t some one answer him?” repeated Peggy, watching Jim’s face uneasily. “Father says, reform is sorely needed, but that we cannot get the most worth-while things in a hurry, and at times he is afraid that some of our people will ruin these provinces through lack of patience.”

“Your father is a wise man, Peggy, but these are difficult days. My two elder brothers think we have had too much patience with our miserable government, but I believe, with father and mother, that unless we are careful we shall find ourselves—what we don’t want to be—part of the United States.”

“That’s what mother fears. She is just as much a Loyalist as her grandfather was when he left New England. She would think it wrong even to listen to this wild talk. Once, long ago, when we were little, John and Jim and I started to school near your place on Dundas Street, and the teacher spent the whole morning telling us what a wicked country Great Britain was. We were full of it when we got home, but we were never sent to that school again.”

“I remember. That was the first time I ever saw you, Peggy. Another time the same teacher brought a whiskey bottle to the school and chased us all out into the snow. That was the last of him. Then the job was given to a poor lame lad who could hardly read himself. He turned cobbler later, but those two killed the school.”

“Shall we ever have good schools?” said Peggy. “I wish Ellen would start one. But Frank, it must be getting late, and I’m sure we’ve had enough of Mr. Mackenzie. I wish we could get hold of Jim.”

“I’ll tell him, if you wish. But I’d better take you out of this crowd first.”

“I’m all right in this nice corner. Oh, he’s looking this way,” and Peggy beckoned energetically. “What is he waiting for? Why doesn’t some one stop that man? People who don’t know will think it’s all true.”

“He is a hard man to argue with. Much of what he says is true. Upon my word, they are going to try to shut him up, if they can’t answer him!” exclaimed Frank excitedly.

The crowd about the wagon swayed this way and that, and there was a thrilling moment when Frank had all he could do to hold off the rush and prevent Peggy’s being forced back against the wall. But the girl’s anxiety was for her brother. “What are they doing?” she cried. “Where’s Jim?”

A body of sturdy lads, unnoticed by those who hung upon Mackenzie’s oratory had come swiftly down Church Street, forced themselves into the crowd, like a wedge, seized the tongue of the wagon and wheeled it so rapidly down the street that the luckless orator was not only carried away from his astonished audience, but had much ado to keep his balance.

Jim, to Peggy’s horror, seemed in even worse case. Taken completely by surprise, he was in danger of being thrown down when the wagon was so violently set going, but being very active and muscular he contrived to hold on to the vehicle as it was rushed along, till Mackenzie, seeing his predicament, reached down and gave him a helping hand.

The appearance of the second figure on the wagon was greeted with jeers and shouts of laughter. But Jim was ill-pleased at the publicity thus suddenly accorded him, and felt that Mackenzie was behaving with very little judgment, when he exclaimed in his carrying voice, “Hallo, young man, what is your name? It has just escaped me, though I know you are one of us.”

“Yes, yes. What is your name, young man?” bawled the crowd, with shouts of taunting laughter. “ ‘One of us!’ are you? Eh?”

Jim, head and shoulders taller than his fiery little companion, could not find a word to say, but Mackenzie’s volubility knew no pause. Alternately he shouted his opinion of the young men, who had so rudely interrupted his harangue, and fired questions at the unwilling partner of his elevation.

“What shall we do with them?” roared one of the roughs, whom Mackenzie had reproached by name. “Dump them into the Bay?”

Jim involuntarily glanced over his shoulder to see how near they were to the water’s edge and was dismayed to see a steamer with two tall, slender funnels—without doubt the Queen Adelaide—cleaving its way swiftly towards the wharf, though still at some distance from the shore.

The sight nerved him to attempt escape, and at the moment of wildest confusion, when some of the more prudent of the aggressors, unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of rushing their victims into the Bay, turned the wagon suddenly into a narrow lane at right angles to their previous course, the boy took a flying leap over the heads of some little fellows, who had contrived to work their way close in beside the wagon, lighted on a doorstep and dashed off like a deer down Church Street.

A howl of derision, not all ill-natured, followed him. “Oh—ho, so you are not ‘one of us’, after all?” A squad of youngsters started in pursuit, but others raised the cry, “Fair play, lads!” and the central figure in the disturbance continued to berate his charioteers and the government officials in whose pay he insisted they must be, with an energy and passion that provoked the onlookers to take sides. The argument presently became a scuffle, in which the wagon was manœuvred into a yard, and Mackenzie was permitted to escape through the back door of a shop which was opened to him from within.

Meanwhile the fleet-footed Jim had dashed down to Front Street, turned westward, up Yonge street and back along Market Street (now known as Wellington Street) to the corner where he had left his sister and his friend.

The disorderly part of the crowd had been drawn away in the attempt to silence Mackenzie, and those who remained on that side of the Market were busy people intent on their own affairs. Consequently no one paid any attention to Jim, when he returned to the scene of his discomfiture, save an idle street urchin, who greeted him with a yell of, “Yah! you are ‘one of us’, ain’t you?”

He had no time to resent this impertinence, even if he had not been particularly anxious to avoid attention, before Peggy sprang towards him with a cry of joy. “Oh, Jim, we were so afraid you must be hurt. Wasn’t it dreadful?”

“It was—ridiculous, Peggy,” replied the boy, his face crimson with shame, indignation and his long run. “But come away. The Queen Adelaide is almost in. I saw it when I was on the wagon. We shall be late.”

“Jim, your clothes are all dust; there’s a tear in your sleeve and there’s mud on your face. Granny would be frightened and perhaps our cousins would be angry, if you met them like that. Miss Crane says English people think you disrespectful, if you go to see them not properly dressed—”

“Peggy, please stop!” exclaimed the harassed and crest-fallen lad, twisting himself into an extraordinary attitude in the effort to get a general view of his garments. “I am in an awful state. You’ll have to go by yourself.”

“There’s plenty of time,” struck in the optimistic Frank. “The Queen Adelaide is a fine boat, but she takes her time to get tied up at the wharf. It won’t take more than ten minutes for you to run in to grandmother’s and have a wash and a brush-up, while Peggy sews the rent in your coat, unless Granny chooses to do it. How will that suit you?”

The Lydgates accepted the offer gratefully and found a new friend in Frank’s kindhearted grandmother. She grasped the situation almost without explanation and had the ugly rent skilfully “drawn together” in less time than it took Jim to wash and Frank to brush the dust off his clothes.

Meanwhile Peggy told her of their errand and of the wonderful joy that was coming to their blind father. And the old lady was so anxious that the other old lady, making such an adventurous journey for such a loving purpose, should not be disappointed of having some of her kith and kin to meet her when she set foot on the new soil, that she fairly pushed them out of the house, whilst urging them to come back to dinner and bring their grandmother, if they could.

“I’m glad you took us in, Frank,” said Peggy. “Your grandmother was lovely to us, and Jim looks fine now, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. Even fit company for the lady wearing the prettiest bonnet in Toronto,” replied Frank slyly.

But Jim still felt perturbed. As they hurried down towards the wharf, he said, after a hasty glance over his shoulder to make sure that no one was within hearing, “Seems to me, Frank, that this fellow Mackenzie hasn’t all the common sense he might have.”

“Plenty of people would agree with you there, Jim. Why do you say so?”

“Well, no doubt it was with the best intentions that he hauled me up beside him, when those mad fellows were trundling the old wagon, helter-skelter, down the street; but he must needs shout at the top of his voice, ‘Hallo, young man, what is your name? I know you’re one of us.’ He is in too big a hurry. Of course, I’m thinking of things, and I see everything is not as pleasant and plain-sailing as the Government would have us believe. But as for Mackenzie knowing that I’m ‘one of us’, as he puts it, he doesn’t know it, for I don’t know it myself and I rather hope—that I never shall know it.”

Frank’s merry face grew serious and he said in a low voice, “I’m with you there. I hope I’m not a coward, but helping to start a war in your own country is a pretty terrible business, and there are lots of good men, who think with Mackenzie that the country never will be prosperous as long as we are at the mercy of a government we have no means of controlling, but will not follow him if he tries to set up for independence. Look at father. He was ready to back him every time in his fight for his seat in the Assembly, but now that he’s talking flat rebellion, father will have none of him, and I’ve promised for my part that I’ll not go chasing into his meetings any more, even to see what’s doing? I didn’t think that there could be any harm in our standing on the edge of the crowd to hear him talk and let Peggy get a sight of him, but I wished I’d not led you to do even that, Jim, when I saw you dragged off with the wagon.”

“It was maddening. I felt such a fool, being tumbled about up there before the staring crowd, with that strange little man shouting and clutching at his wig, dancing like a mountebank, then grabbing at me and making me jig with him in spite of myself.” Jim laughed ruefully, adding, “It’s disgusting to be made such an exhibition of!”

But honest Peggy “spoke not a word of sorrow,” for the occurrence had lifted from her heart a weight which had oppressed her ever since the day, when Jim had insisted on her sharing his momentous secret.

“We must hurry,” Frank broke in, as they reached the head of the wharf. “There’s the first man off the Queen Adelaide now. I’ll stand back a bit while you speak to your relations, but if there is anything I can do just wave to me.”

THE TRAVELLERS.

“There they are,” exclaimed Jim, as the passengers began to come off the boat in a straggling procession.

“That’s Grandmother, at any rate,” cried Peggy, springing forward in her usual impulsive fashion to welcome a little elderly lady, whose sweet face was framed by a snowy “cap” within her close black bonnet. Though she was almost at the end of a long and tedious journey, her grey-blue eyes were bright and clear and her thin cheeks were softly pink.

“Oh, darling, darling Granny,” was all Peggy could find to say, as she put her arms about the slender, upright little figure in a tumultuous hug. The girl’s enthusiastic greeting almost took away the old lady’s breath, but she endured it joyfully. It seemed so good to her to have a creature so young and pretty claiming her in this rapturous fashion that she felt instantly at home in the new country. But, from the deck, she had seen Jim as well as Peggy, and while she held her granddaughter tight with one hand, she stretched out the other to the boy, who looked so like the son she had sent overseas, twenty-six years ago. “John or Jim?” she asked, adding anxiously, “What of your father? Is he well?”

“Yes, yes,” they assured her and then both remembered the awe-inspiring cousin, and turned to see a slim, bewildered-looking gentleman, not nearly so tall as their father, who gave them a hasty smile over the heads of three jolly little girls, marshalled in a row on an embankment of small luggage, before he dashed back to the gangway to meet a handsome lady (much younger than himself) and relieve her of the merriest-looking baby-boy Peggy had ever seen. After the mistress followed a rosy-cheeked maid, bearing a miscellaneous collection of bags and shawls and toys, which she deposited on the wharf beside the heap occupied by the little girls.

The lady was tall, and the very manner of her walking suggested decision of character. She had quick, bright eyes, that seemed to see everything in a moment, and Peggy immediately concluded that it would be “Cousin Maria,” and not her learned husband, whose judgment would condemn or approve the work of the Lydgate Academy.

As they advanced to meet this stately dame, Peggy, feeling the need for reinforcements, turned and waved to the watchful Frank. And he proved an ally worth having. After the cousins had duly greeted each other, Frank attached himself to the lady, answered her questions and did many small errands for her, whilst her husband was taken in tow by two courteous dignitaries from Upper Canada College, and Jim devoted himself to the children.

Despite this division of labour, it proved no small task to get the new arrivals and all their belongings into the conveyances awaiting them. But as the classical master wandered hither and thither seeking some lost package and his wife sorted and arranged and directed things both found time for a few kind words of farewell and good wishes to “Aunt Margaret”, for messages to her son and his wife and for renewed assurances that they would take the earliest opportunity of visiting them.

“Cousin Maria sounds as if she really wants to come to our house,” remarked Peggy in astonishment, when at last the party for the College had got under way.

“Why not?” demanded Jim. “Are you afraid of her?”

“Rather,” was the answer. “But I’m not one bit afraid of Cousin Robert or of Granny.”

At this moment Frank came to remind them of his grandmother’s invitation and they just had time for a hasty lunch in the pretty white cottage, before the shrill whistle of the Queen Adelaide warned them to go aboard.

It was a glorious afternoon, and Jim and Peggy (though somewhat disappointed that their grandmother felt it necessary to rest in the cabin) enjoyed every moment of their trip in the wonderful steam-driven vessel. There was so much to see on the boat itself and from its high upper deck (beginning with the beautiful view of the city’s public buildings and houses nestling amongst the trees) that even Peggy was half subdued.

After a quick run they landed on the fine wharf at Oakville, and who should be down to bring his wife and daughter to the boat but Simon Hurd?

Now this was good fortune indeed, for Mr. Hurd’s light wagon was the “easiest-riding” of any carriage for ten miles round, and no one could beat him as a driver. Thus “Granny Lydgate”, as the neighbours called her from the beginning, entered the bush under most auspicious circumstances. Never to Peggy’s thinking had lake and sky and the glorious woods looked more lovely than on that evening and she was sure that Granny was enjoying it all too.

Peggy could scarcely believe that it was not yet thirty-six hours since she and Jim had started on their adventure in John’s ox-wagon, for the time had been crowded with events and sight-seeing more than enough for a week; but she knew it must have seemed even longer to those left behind, and she was thankful that they were getting home almost before any one had a right to expect them.

When they turned at the Twin Oaks into the bush road, even Hurd’s careful driving could not prevent dreadful bumps and jerks, and Peggy became anxious lest the fragile old lady should be hurt or terrified. But she was neither. She hardly spoke and she clung fast to the side rail of the seat, but her thoughts were with the son, whom she had not seen for so many years, whom in the long time of caring for an incurably invalided sister, she had given up hope of ever seeing again. Strange to say, when a year ago, that sister had passed away, her own work had appeared to be done, and she had imagined herself too old and too worn-out to fill her life with other tasks or make new friends in place of those she had lost. The news that her nephew and his family were leaving England had come as a blow to her; but out of that threatening misfortune had arisen the chance for this great adventure, and her lost strength and energy had returned.

As she told the story to Lesley, Robert Lydgate and his wife had gone to bid her farewell three weeks before they were to sail in the Royal Duke, and to ask if she had any message or parcel to send by them. She had answered, “Yes,” and then Maria, looking at her with those strange, penetrating eyes of hers had exclaimed, “Why not come with us, Aunt Margaret? You would be your own best messenger, and Robert and I cannot bear the thought of leaving you here alone.” “I wish I could,” she had answered, as if it were an impossibility, but the suggestion had re-kindled old dreams and hopes. Before Maria left the house her aunt had decided that her plan was not absolutely wild; and, by morning dawned, she had determined to dispose of her house, arrange her financial affairs as best she could in such haste, and go.

It was strenuous work, but, to the amazement of her deliberate nephew and the admiration of his wife, she had managed to conclude all necessary business on the day before they had to go aboard ship. Happily she proved so good a traveller, that the long voyage gave her a much-needed rest; and, as she told her niece, when they parted, she was “ready for anything”.

Yet now she dreaded the longed-for moment when she should again hold her dear, only son in her arms. The last half mile of rugged track appeared interminable to Peggy, but the quiet old lady did not know it was rough. Mind and heart were full of her son, her son!

It was Mary Lydgate who met them at the door. None of the boys were to be seen. It was Mary, who almost lifted her mother-in-law from the wagon and led her through the kitchen to the inner room. It was dimly lighted with one candle, but Mrs. Lydgate saw instantly a tall figure, standing with bowed head, silhouetted against the uncurtained window.

“Lesley,” said Mary softly, “here is mother.”

“Mother,” echoed the tones that for so many years Margaret Lydgate had heard only in her dreams. The blind man took a step forward, holding out his arms like a child, and the little old lady ran to him.

Mary left the two together, gently closed the creaking door, and went out into the summer night to find the children, in their favourite retreat across the clearing. They were listening to the carefully-subdued voices, now of Peggy, then of Jim, telling of their travels and of the good fortune that had attended their journey to the city. Only they did not mention Jim’s brief, unintentional, too-hasty ride with William Lyon Mackenzie.

The elder Mrs. Lydgate spent her first Sunday quietly with her son and his family. On the following Sunday Mr. Whitby held service in Stephen Bennett’s barn and Granny went to church with the rest. After that the neighbours came from far and near to see her. Amongst these were the Cranes, and they were charmed with the pretty old lady, but James Crane was disturbed to think how uncomfortable she must be in the little overcrowded log house.

“She is not unhappy about herself,” said Milly. “She has come determined to make the best of things and the joy of being with her son is what counts.”

“Besides the Lydgates really are a charming family,” put in Ellen, with unusual emphasis. “She may sometimes find their high spirits and energy rather overpowering, but she is so young at heart that she will adapt herself.”

“Yes, yes, that’s all very well,” said James Crane hastily, “But I’ve been thinking that something might be done—by the neighbours perhaps—to make life a bit more comfortable for her.”

“I knew, James, that you were brewing some great scheme,” murmured his wife. “Please let us into the secret.”

“It’s very simple,” replied Crane. “Since the people here are so fond of ‘bees’, why shouldn’t we have a bee? I understand, from something John said, that for years they have kept some fine timber with a view to the enlargement of their dwelling. So I say, why shouldn’t we have a bee and build a nice two-room extension to the Lydgates’ house?”

“Suppose they don’t want it?” suggested Milly. “Wouldn’t it be a difficult house to enlarge?”

“Not at all.” James Crane had a passion for adding to and altering houses. He whipped out a lead pencil and a bit of paper. “Look at this. I would build out a neat little bedroom and sitting-room here, on the west side—you see what I mean?—just behind the big chimney. The warmth from that will help to keep up the temperature, but I would plan for another fireplace, or perhaps a stove, in the extension. Then Mrs. Lydgate, Senior, can have her own books and the furniture which she tells me she left in charge of the cousins at Toronto, and she will really begin to feel at home.”

“It sounds splendid,” said Milly, “but how could they meet the expense?”

“The fact is, I mentioned it to Simon Hurd yesterday and he said promptly that he would saw the lumber in his mill, for flooring and doors and finishing without charge, if he got it early enough to put the job in at his own time. He is certain we can easily obtain all the help we want, and he says it’s a shame that an old lady who would be at home in Government House, should not have a place to call her own. I’m thinking I’ll cross the Creek this afternoon and talk to Lesley about it.”

In due time the talking resulted in action. Early in October the “raising bee” was held; by the end of the month the extension was practically finished, and a wonderful place it was. It was no mere lean-to, but a well-proportioned addition to the original house. It had a garret above the two rooms, of which one was a cosy little bedroom, and the other a sitting-room, with a fine west window, an ample fireplace and a set of built-in shelves for books and knicknacks.

When the first snowfall made the roads passable, John went up to Toronto, met the dreaded but most hospitable cousins and brought home Granny’s belongings. These, to the wondering delight of the family and the neighbours, included a small round table of polished mahogany, a couple of easy chairs, two or three pictures, a rug or two, a precious china tea-service and a small case of books, some of which had been gifts to her son in his youth. Naturally Granny’s little library was a rather miscellaneous collection; but it was none the worse for that and happily it contained a few works of fiction and poetry as well as some good religious and historical books.

The building and furnishings of what Robin had dubbed “Granny’s Little House”, was an event in the family history and the annals of the township, for “everybody” had helped to attain the delightful result, again putting the Lydgates into debt, to be ultimately repaid by “changing work”.

A housewarming was planned for Granny’s birthday during the first week in December, but, in the meantime, Lesley suggested that his mother should invite Mr. Whitby to hold his service there on a certain Sunday in November, and the idea greatly appealed to Mrs. Lydgate. Special invitations were sent to every one who had had the least part in the building, and, as the weather was fine, the extension, with its queer array of logs and boxes and other improvised seats, was full to overflowing. But Mr. Whitby took his stand in the doorway between the two rooms, and every one could see and hear him.

His text was, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it”; and, afterwards, when they knelt together at the Lord’s Supper, many of his hearers, including Granny herself, felt there was something sacred about the dear, homely, little house, which owed its being to the “love and charity” of those who saw themselves as neighbours to a new-comer and a stranger.

There was much singing at the service, Mary leading as usual, but one little thing seemed strange to the elder Mrs. Lydgate. There were only three or four hymnbooks, including the minister’s and her own; but every one knew those grand old hymns, “O, God, our help in ages past,” and “Jerusalem, my happy home,” and two or three less familiar ones were “given out” verse by verse.

After supper, when all the neighbours had gone away, and the children were busy over the necessary evening’s work, the old lady and her son went again into the new rooms and, sitting hand in hand, almost in silence had another beautiful hour together.

And then Mary came in and sang to them softly, old, old words to tunes that Margaret Lydgate had known all her life, and when she went to bed that night she had a happy sense (so adaptable was she) that the little house was really and truly home to her.

THE HOUSEWARMING.

During the first week in December, the Lydgates’ hands were full with the last preparations for Granny’s party, though much had been done already in the way of furbishing up the house, repairing best garments and taking in cordwood to Oakville to trade for the extra supplies of flour and sugar and other groceries needed for the feast. But in that final week, Jim had to go into the woods with his gun, Mary and her daughter had to make everything spick and span, and the bake-kettle had to be kept constantly at work to bake all the bread and scones and sweet things, which the size of the expected gathering demanded. Invitations had been issued lavishly and some guests had accepted who lived twenty-five miles away.

All through the preparations Granny was as happy and busy as a child immersed in some new and delightful occupation. She was so eager to help and so quietly determined not to interfere with the established order of the household that her daughter-in-law (who had secretly feared that it might be impossible to make her happy in a life so strange to her) put that fear completely away and began to rejoice in her presence, not only for her husband’s sake, but for her own. As for Peggy and the boys, they felt that the little lady (“not so very old after all,”) had brought into their lives a strange breath of freshness. Her trim, old-world dresses, her ready smile, her quick wit, her knowledge of books and of the world in which their father had grown up, above all, her keenness about the new world to which they belonged, had, in a week, made them, one and all, her devoted slaves.

“It’s curious,” said Jim, one day, with a laugh, “Granny doesn’t seem as old to me as Miss Crane did when the Lydgate Academy opened.”

“Miss Crane is only a year older than you, Jim,” said John reproachfully. He never liked any one to disparage their late teacher in the slightest degree.

“A year and a half to be accurate,” corrected Peggy, “but wasn’t it a grand thing for us, Jim, that she came when she did? ‘What would Granny have thought?’ as father used to say to us, if none of us could have used the books she brought? Oh, boys, I am ready to dance for joy, when I think of those four shelves of books, under our own roof—one hundred and twenty-three volumes. Isn’t that riches?”

“Yes, and all of us able to read in them,” put in John.

“And then—” Peggy hesitated, with a droll wrinkling of her forehead—“then there’s our—deportment! What would our feelings have been, when we went to meet our grand cousins, Jim, if we hadn’t had any?”

“I hope there was enough of it for them to see,” he replied; “but I was going to tell you that we shall need all the deportment we’ve got for this party, for Cousin Maria has sent word by Pete Dimsdale that after all she is coming to-morrow by the coach, to spend a few days with us, though unfortunately her husband cannot leave town just now.”

Robert Lydgate had paid his promised visit to his cousin in September, before the school opened, but his wife had not been able to accompany him then, and, when invited to the birthday party, had at first sent a regretful refusal.

“Whew!” whistled Tom. “I’d like to see her some time, but I think we might have had more fun, if she’d stayed away from the party.”

“I’m not afraid of Cousin Maria,” piped up Robin.

“Neither am I, now,” said John. “She’s a stately-looking woman and she has a way with her like a queen (I should think) but you should see her with those funny little girls of hers. And she was just as good to me as mother is, when some one comes in here hungry and tired. The only thing is—she does ask a lot of questions, and once or twice”—John lowered his voice to a tone of awe—“I couldn’t help thinking she put things down that I had said in a little black book, not just when I said it, but afterwards. She seems very fond of writing, and some times she’d stop and look at me in a kind of considering way, and then go on again very fast.”

“Perhaps she is going to write a book,” said Peggy, mightily interested.

“Oh, dear, it makes me tired to think of it,” said Tom. “It would be worse than twenty thousand copies rolled into one.”

Next day, John set off with the ox-wagon to the Twin Oaks in very good time. Consequently he had to wait more than an hour for the expected guest before the red coach hove in sight. In all probability Cousin Maria had found the journey trying, but she descended from the vehicle brisk as ever and quite prepared, it seemed, to enjoy her ride through the wintry woods in John’s unconventional chariot. Indeed she was in that happy holiday mood, when one is ready to find pleasure in the unexpected, even if it takes the form of slight mishaps.

“I love the country,” she told Mr. Lydgate afterwards, “and I dare say I shall get to love ugly little Toronto in time, though I did begin to wonder this autumn, whether it wasn’t going to disappear altogether in its own mud. It seems so odd to us after London, such a bit of a town—only ten or twelve thousand people, they say—so far from everywhere—so hard to buy anything in, yet so conscious of its own importance, with its Governor and its Parliament House and its officials (with their one or two thousand pounds a year) and its great landed proprietors, owning ten or twenty thousand acres apiece.”

“Yes, and the worst of it is, in most cases the owners of these huge blocks of land do little or nothing to improve them, and we—the actual settlers—are so scattered that we cannot have good roads, nor schools, nor churches, nor markets for our produce, and it drives thousands of our immigrants to the United States.”

The little black book came out, and Mrs. Lydgate said seriously, “I have heard something of this in Toronto. So you think the agitators have a real grievance?”

“A real grievance! My dear cousin, conditions are almost desperate and unless a remedy is applied speedily, these provinces must be ruined.”

“But why should you sit down to such a state of things? You have a Parliament, as we have in England. You make your own laws. Are you not yourselves to blame for all this?”

“Not so, cousin. Our Government is supposed to be modelled on that of the Motherland, but there is a vital difference. The British can turn out a Government, with which they are dissatisfied. If it is outvoted, the ministry must resign. But our representatives may outvote the Executive Council time and again, and it goes on exactly as before, doing or leaving undone just what it chooses. Only the Governor can dismiss it, and it is a rare thing for a Governor to understand the real conditions. What does Sir Francis know about the desires, the hardships, the needs of settlers like ourselves? The men he meets belong to the wealthy and official class and they cannot see things as we do.”

Cousin Maria was very busy with the black book for some minutes, saying never a word. At last she said anxiously, “You are quite convinced then, Lesley, that there is something behind all this talk of unrest and discontent?”

“Maria, a storm is brewing. I fear it must soon break, but my hope is that even yet it may be averted, if the people at home can be made to see that the ills we suffer are not merely questions for argument but are matters of life and death to us. I wish we knew of some broad-minded, disinterested statesman to whom we could appeal. Even yet it might not be too late, could the British authorities be made to understand the real situation.”

“You don’t mind my taking a note of what you say,” said Maria. “Perhaps, who knows—”

They were interrupted by the arrival of the first of the expected guests.

Some came on foot. Some in ox-wagons. Some only got through at all by starting their journey, longer or shorter as the case might be, very early, for the ways were soft and miry to the last degree. Others, who had hoped against hope for sleighing, were forced regretfully to stay at home. Nevertheless, before supper-time a large company of men, women and children, from weather-beaten grey-beards to round-eyed infants filled “Granny’s Extension” to overflowing.

Every man from precise James Crane to careless old Steve had donned his best attire, whilst the ladies, after shedding their strange dingy wrappings of precaution against cold and mud, appeared resplendent in carefully preserved finery of many dates. Mrs. Bennett relied for effect on a beautifully starched white apron. Mrs. Simon had a new blue silk gown which was up-to-date so far as that was possible when fashions came thousands of miles by sailing vessel and stage. Cousin Maria was gorgeous, and most unintentionally alarming, in purple satin. Peggy wore the green gingham, but sweet as she looked, the company in general was far more impressed by her grandmother, in her neatly fitting black silk, her lace mittens and her best white cap—its tiny frills setting off the bright eyes, pink cheeks and soft grey hair of its wearer. They had known Peggy all her life; but notwithstanding the general prejudice against new-comers, the fact that the eldest Mrs. Lydgate was so unlike any old lady they had ever seen was one of her charms, while in some mysterious way the building of her little house had made her one of themselves.

To the Lydgate family, while several of the guests were a source of wondering delight, their whilom task-mistress, Ellen Crane, was the “belle of the ball”. She entered her hostess’s bedroom so sombre and stiff that Peggy strangely thought of a chrysalis. She came out a shimmering butterfly, with gauzy draperies in place of wings and hair elaborately dressed and curled by her sister-in-law in a fashion that minimized the length of her neck, the thinness of her cheeks, and brought out the youthful look to which she had a right. Peggy’s ecstasies were a little disconcerting, but she accepted them without rebuke, shyly smiling, whilst Robin hovered about her in delight that was obviously half amazement. His big brother, John, hovered too, with admiration in his honest eyes that his tongue could not express, and as the evening went on Ellen grew ever more at ease and more gay and girlish.

But nearly everyone was in the happiest humour. Of course there were difficulties in feasting so many, but ultimately each guest was served with what he or she liked, unless one or two of the men would have preferred some stronger beverage (which they would assuredly have been offered in almost any other house in the neighbourhood) than the excellent tea, served in Granny’s beautiful china. However, they had known what to expect for the gentle master of the ceremonies had resolutely set his face against the drinking of whiskey on his farm, even at the “raising” or “logging bees”.

The tables cleared away, there were games and country dances. At last even the children were ready for a rest; then they popped corn, ate maple sugar, told stories, and sang songs and catches.

But more than once, when the fun and laughter were at their height, Peggy, thinking that she heard the beat of horse-hoofs, went to the door.

“Who is to come?” whispered observant Jim.

“Frank promised to be here, when he was at home a week ago.”

“He must have given it up. The roads are dreadful for this time of year.”

Peggy shook her head. “He promised,” she said.

“He won’t come now. The others are beginning to say ‘Good-bye’ to Granny.”

But Jim was mistaken. Some time after midnight “the back-road crowd” was being packed into the wagon of Daniel Craig, an American settler, who, by the way, was strangely resentful of Cousin Maria’s thirst for correct information about life in the bush in all its aspects, including the attitude of the farmers towards Mackenzie and his fellow-agitators. There was much jesting and laughter in getting everyone seated, when a horseman suddenly appeared in the little circle of light cast by the torches and candle-lanterns and was greeted with the cry of “Here’s Frank!” or “Here’s Beauty!” But the observant demanded, “What’s happened to your own horse?” for on this occasion Frank’s mount was a lean rangey chestnut, and both rider and steed were covered with mud from head to foot.

Peggy pressed forward anxiously, “Frank, what is the matter? Is Beauty hurt? Has she hurt you?”

“No, no, Peggy. I’m all right. Never mind Beauty. I’ll tell you about her afterwards. I was late starting, and the roads are at their worst, but ‘all’s well that ends well’, though it looks as if I’ve missed the party. You’re wanting to get off, Daniel? Well, don’t wait on my account. Good-night, all.”

Waving a farewell to the company, and leaving his horse to the loving ministrations of John, whose ambition it was some day to own a horse himself, Frank followed Peggy into the kitchen, but stopped just inside the door to whisper excitedly, “Where’s Jim?”

“In the new garret, hunting for more nuts. What is the matter, Frank?”

“I’ll tell you all in a minute. But, first, has Jim been to any of Mackenzie’s meetings in these last two weeks?”

“No, he’s been at home. I don’t think he has been anxious to see Mackenzie since that time in Toronto.”

“That’s good. Now, Peggy, tell me, quick, who’s here?”

Peggy ran over the names, wondering at Frank’s manner.

“Not the Wenlocks? nor ’Lijah Edgecombe?”

“They did not come.”

“They didn’t? I wonder—well, it’s no matter. Are father and mother still here?”

“They are getting ready to go.”

“I’ll run in and speak to them—and your father and mother. Come along, Peggy. I want you to hear. No, there’s no hurry about my supper.”

Frank found his parents and Peggy’s in the new sitting-room with two or three others. He was greeted with a chorus of exclamations and questions, and at the sound of the excitement everyone hurried in to hear the news. “What is the matter, Frank?” asked his mother, as anxiously as Peggy had asked the same question. “We never thought you would try to get here to-night. Such roads too!”

“I promised and I wanted to come. The roads are bad, but I couldn’t get out of the city with Beauty—”

“Couldn’t get out of the city!”

Frank held up his hand. “Please, friends, it’s rather a long story. The fact is Mackenzie is keeping his word—and there’s a great mob of people down from the north, bound to take Toronto—only they are dead beat. The city is in wild excitement. Grandfather heard the rebels were gathering, and went to the Governor yesterday, but all he said was ‘Let them come if they dare!’ He thought grandfather was frightened, but he and Granny are as cool as snow. Granny gave me a letter to you, mother, but she says, ‘No rebels will ever take Toronto.’ ”

“Take Toronto!” gasped Cousin Maria, who had come in unnoticed. “Oh, my poor husband and my babies—why did I leave them? Why did that mad Governor of ours send all the troops to Lower Canada?”

Frank turned to her re-assuringly. “Madam, the rebels are not half armed. The citizens have the best of it there, for there are enough muskets for an army in the City Hall.”

“I am worried about the children and Robert,” said Maria. She spoke quietly now. “Please, Mr. Hurd, tell us all you know—the very worst!”

“I don’t know much, but grandfather says things will not come to the worst even now, if Sir Francis shows any judgment?”

“That’s true,” said Simon Hurd. “There are plenty of Reformers like Robert Baldwin and my father-in-law; Lesley Lydgate, and myself, that don’t want to see the Government overturned. In fact, it’s only a few hotheads that Mackenzie has at his back—though he has done fine work for Canada, and there are many of us that stood by him through thick and thin till he took up this mad notion of rebellion and independence. However, go on, Frank!”

“I had asked grandfather to let me come here to-day, but he wanted me to take messages to two or three folks, and that made me late starting. One was a note to a man up Yonge Street above Montgomery’s Tavern. I got started about dark, and hoped to do my errand and cut across into Dundas Street, but it was no go. Some lads sprang out upon me, a piece above the Toll-Gate, and tried to take me prisoner. Luckily, the way they grabbed at Beauty put her in a rage, and she reared and pranced and shook them off. Then I got her turned round, and she galloped away like a deer—the lads after us yelling like mad. I was sure they’d never let me pass the Toll-Gate again, and I didn’t want to be caught with Grandfather’s letter on me, so I turned westward into the woods and finally got Davis to put Beauty away in his stable. Then I went on, hiding whenever I heard anyone, till I struck Dundas Street. Finally, I borrowed ‘Ginger’ from Mr. Slater, and I will say the sorry-looking beast has lots of spirit. Even Beauty would hardly have made better time on such roads. But now, Mr. Lydgate, will you excuse my giving Dad a message from grandfather?”

The father and son went out together to the barn and there they met with John and Mr. Crane. The upshot was that a little company of half-a-dozen men volunteered to help if needed in the defence of Toronto; and Mr. Hurd promised to drive down in the morning to Oakville to offer their services to the authorities.

Hearing of this plan, Cousin Maria begged Simon to try to help her to get home but, not being more favourably impressed with the lady than was Daniel Craig, he urged that she should not attempt the journey until things quieted down.

“But I must go,” she insisted.

“I do not see how I can help you, madam,” answered Simon.

“My poor children,” murmured the lady.

“Surely it was a mistake for you to leave them, Mrs. Lydgate,” and Simon turned away with what Peggy thought an unpleasant expression on his usually kind face.

“Of course you want to go, and you shall go,” said the girl hotly. “Wait till the wagons get off, and then we’ll talk things over with father and mother.”

Cousin Maria kissed her and was comforted. “I could walk,” she said. “I am a good walker and very strong.”

Half an hour later the last of the wagons had bumped and lurched down the lane, with Frank on Ginger bringing up the rear.

Then John and Tom came in and announced that they had volunteered to serve in the company that Simon Hurd (who, like Lesley Lydgate, had had experience of warfare in 1812 and the two following years) was recruiting.

“I am glad you have given in your names, boys,” said their father. “The stronger the loyal forces, the less likelihood of a serious uprising. But,” he added, after a pause, “we cannot close our eyes to the fact that the situation is dangerous, and, from all accounts there may be trouble in this very district, so, if you two go, I think it will be only right that Jim should stay at home.”

Jim, who had just come in from an eager talk with Frank, only said, “I will do what you think best, father.”

But Peggy cried out, “I wish I was a man. I would give anything to go.” Then seeing that Jim’s face had grown hot, she threw her arms round his neck and made things worse by saying, “Oh, Jim, I did not mean that.”

“Jim may have the hardest work of all, Peggy,” said Lesley. “We have no idea where a blow may be struck. It may fall in our own township.”

Jim grasped his hand. “Father you are captain here,” he said, “and I promise you I’ll obey orders.” But, to Peggy’s thinking, he still looked unhappy over her mean words, and she felt more ashamed than ever when her brother said, “I told father all about those lists last week, and he thought that after I had so nearly joined the—rebels, it would seem almost like treachery for me to take up arms against them. Of course if they attack us my duty will be clear.”

“Forgive me, Jim!”

“Oh, I understand, Peggy, but the Loyalists won’t. I know they’ll think I’m just a coward, and I wish I could have gone with old John, though I’m sure father planned this to spare me.” Yet the best-made plans miscarry, and Jim was not destined “to stay by the stuff”.

A SEEKER FOR KNOWLEDGE.

The week that followed the party was packed so full of excitement and strenuous toil; of contradictory news and wild rumour; of hasty journeys; of hurried partings, that every member of the family had his own independent idea of what happened, but could never convince the rest that his memory had not played him false. A singular feature of the time was that the Lydgates were quite unusually divided in opinion as to what was the paramount duty of the hour.

Lesley Lydgate’s main concern was “to get at the truth”, and John’s “to get at the enemy”. His mother was intent on seeing that her two volunteers should want for no equipment or comfort that she could possibly supply. Jim tried to forget his shame for the past and in the present by planning for the safety of the family and its belongings and making preparations for defence in case of attack. He put the family fowling-piece in order; John walked five miles to borrow the second gun of an old neighbour, while Tom had to content himself with cutting a stout club.

Through it all, Peggy’s chief anxiety was to put Cousin Maria in the way of reaching home again. She discussed the problem with her father. Finally they called Jim into the consultation, and amongst them they decided that he should take Cousin Maria and her luggage in the ox-wagon to the Blue Boar or possibly even beyond. In any case, he was to arrange for her passage in the coach, if the coach was still on its proper business, or, if not, in any other safe conveyance going to Toronto, but should these plans fail, he valiantly undertook to get her forward on her journey “somehow”.

It was not without misgiving that John helped his brother to prepare for this expedition, for Jim never cared to work with oxen, but he was so unusually grave and restrained in his manner that his elder brother (and possibly the oxen) hoped for the best. If John had not pledged himself to enroll at a moment’s notice for the relief of Toronto, he would have taken Cousin Maria home and offered his services to the authorities in the city itself.

As for Jim, he could not help wishing that Cousin Maria had chosen another time for her visit, or, having come, would at least defer her investigations into the causes of the rising until a less exciting season. As he put her belongings into the wagon, he could hear her examining his father on the attitude of the American settlers towards the King and the points in dispute.

“Mother, you must not expect me till you see me,” called the boy as his deliberate team got under way.

“Ought you to let them go, Lesley?” asked Granny, fluttering her white handkerchief as the way-farers plunged into the ruts which marked their way citywards. “What if some of the evil-disposed should overtake them?”

“There is no danger of trouble for them, mother. Everyone in these parts knows Jim and he knows everyone. I should not like him to shirk his duty, and one of the boys must help Cousin Maria to get back to those little ones.”

An hour later, he said to Peggy, “It seemed strange to me that Simon Hurd was so unwilling to do anything for Maria. He could have taken her to his own house last night, where she would have had a chance of a lift. It was not like Simon. How did it strike you, lassie?”

“I thought for once in his life he was very unkind. We may need Jim dreadfully before all is done—but Simon does not like Cousin Maria, father. Frank thinks she is good fun; but Simon looks as if he’s afraid of the things she says.”

“She nearly drove Daniel Craig wild last night by asking him what he thought about Mackenzie,” remarked Tom. “I don’t suppose she’d have liked to hear his real thoughts. He and ’Lijah Edgecombe and the two Wenlocks were all at Mackenzie’s big meeting in Esquesing. I heard Craig telling Jim that they had been and asking him why he had not gone too. Jim got red in the face, and then Craig whispered something, and shook his fist at him and was angry and walked away. He got all his crowd into the wagon in pretty quick time after that.”

“Tom, don’t tell anyone about Craig’s speaking to Jim,” said Mr. Lydgate, but his tone made Peggy anxious.

“Father, would you have sent Jim if you had heard sooner that Craig was angry with him?” she whispered.

“Don’t be frightened, little daughter. Didn’t we all agree that we must send Cousin Maria home, as she naturally wanted to go so much?—and there was no one but Jim to take her.”

“Yes, but, father, I’m afraid now for Jim.”

Lesley Lydgate saw no use in admitting that he too was troubled by Tom’s story, but Peggy was not deceived by his silence, and all through that busy day her ears were on the alert for the creak of the ox-wagon.

Simon Hurd sent word by Tobin that he wished John and Tom to join his company at Oakville before noon on the following day.

It grew dark, but still there was no sign of Jim. Soon after sunset, the other boys dug a great hole in the wood beyond the clearing, and thither the family carried such of their valuables—chiefly Granny’s treasures, by the way—as could safely be interred in damp earth. Finally, John at once concealed and marked the spot with branches and logs. He then set out with an unlighted lantern to seek for signs or news of the wanderer.

His sister wished to go with him, but he said, “No, no, Peggy. You were not in bed more than two hours last night. Go and rest, and I will wake you if I get any news, good or bad. Remember, we have to leave early in the morning and then—you don’t know what may fall on you. You’ll need all your strength. For the sake of father and mother and granny, rest while you have a chance. Say a bit of a prayer for us all and go to bed.”

Peggy knew it was the right thing to do; none of them had had any sleep worth mentioning on the previous night, so she crept into her little bed and, despite her anxiety, fell fast asleep in two minutes. Her night was undisturbed, for John returned home after a couple of hours with no news of his brother. But day brought one excitement after another.

When the time came for the elder boys to start on their march to Oakville Peggy and Robin walked with them towards Dundas Street.

“Don’t let mother worry about Jim,” was John’s impossible instruction. “I expect he found that he had to go all the way to Toronto—and perhaps had to watch his opportunity of getting into the city—but I’ll go up to Upper Canada College the first chance I get and I’ll try to send you word what has happened. Maybe we shall run across Jim himself.”

“Maybe you’ll find Toronto taken,” said Peggy gloomily.

“Then we shall have to take it back,” replied John, “but I don’t expect any such thing.”

Tom and Robin were walking hand in hand a little way ahead. Suddenly the small boy turned round and called out, “Here’s Mr. Crane, Peggy.”

“What is he doing here, I wonder?” murmured Peggy.

He was an impressive figure in the ill-fitting suit of homespun which he always put on when he “meant business”, with a knapsack on his back, a pistol in his belt and the ancient blunderbuss upon his shoulder.

“Peggy, you are a blessed sight,” he said. “I was going to see you before marching down to Oakville. Ellen is badly downhearted, but Milly pretends she has no fear of anything for anybody. She was going to drive me down, but Dobbin has fallen lame or is putting it on, so I had to come on my own feet. However, between ourselves, I am just as glad to leave them comparatively safe at home.”

“Mr. Crane, why didn’t you hide your gun in the bush instead of carrying it up here?” asked John with a chuckle. “I’m afraid you’ll be tired of it before you have done. That fellow is no light weight.”

“I was afraid of losing it, and it seemed as if it wouldn’t hide; but it is as heavy as lead,” was the rueful reply. “Now, Peggy, I want to ask you a big favour. I know you have enough on your hands; but if things look to be getting very bad, will you ask your father if my wife and sister may bring the beasts and come down to you? And—and—suppose anything happens to me—will you try to comfort them a bit? We are a lonely set of folk, Peggy.”

For once it was John who spoke up quickly. “You may count on us all—or any of us. We have none of us forgotten what—Ellen—did for us.”

But Mr. Crane’s words had frightened Peggy, and she could only manage to whisper the one word, “Yes”.

“Now, Peggy,” said John, “had you not better go back?”

“Not yet,” said the girl. “If we go to the road, we may hear something of Jim.”

“Where is Jim?” enquired Mr. Crane.

“We don’t know yet,” replied John. He explained the circumstances, and was somewhat annoyed when Mr. Crane shook his head, allowed his face to grow longer, and observed solemnly, “That’s bad.”

“If you do go down to the road, Peggy, run in to Stephen’s. He’ll have lots of news at a time like this. He’s as good as a newspaper when anything is happening. But, perhaps nothing is really happening, after all,” said the determined optimist cheerfully. “I’ll warrant the Governor won’t have much trouble in quieting things down, if he’ll only be reasonable. It’s few of our people that are rebels at heart.”

Stephen was leaning against a stump in front of his house when the three volunteers and their escort came along the road.

“Eh, Mr. Crane, but you’ve got a grand gun. None of the rebels will stand to be shot at with that!” jeered the old man. “You’re a regular walking arsenal, that’s what you are, sir.”

“What’s the news, Stephen?” asked John.

“Well, an Oakville man was telling me that Sammy Lane came in late last night in his boat from Toronto with the news that all the windows on most of the streets in the city was stuffed up with mattresses so the folk could shoot from behind them down into the ranks of the Patriots. Monday night, there must have been some sort of battle up near the Toll-Gate on Yonge Street—leastways there was men killed on both sides; and the Governor’s in an awful way. First thing he does yesterday was to get his missus and the children on board a vessel in the bay, and then he sends some fellow—they said one of the doctors—with a white flag to Mackenzie to see what him and his fellows wanted.”

“A flag of truce! Never!” exclaimed Mr. Crane.

“Well, if you knows better, sir, that’s all right,” returned the old man testily, “but let me tell you one thing—nothing’s too queer for me to believe of Sir Francis.”

“Did you hear anything of Jim, Stephen?” enquired Peggy.

“Of Jim? No. What’s that lad up to now? I did see him setting off yesterday morning with your ox-team; and that fine lady cousin of yours with him. She’s a handsome, pleasant well-spoken woman—for all she’s English—saving your presence, Mr. Crane—but do you know what they’ve got it all down Dundas Street?”

John pretended not to hear. Looking up at the sun he observed that the time was getting on and they must be going; but Peggy asked, “What do they say?”

“Why, it’s got round pretty general that she’s not what she seems.”

“Ah?” said Mr. Crane with a questioning intonation, lifting the blunderbuss from his aching shoulder, and using the cumbrous thing as a support.

“What is she then?” demanded Peggy.

“Now, now, Missy, if you want to hear what folk are saying I’ll tell you; but don’t you forget it, I didn’t start the tale.”

“I do want to hear,” replied Peggy, in a conciliatory tone. John made a movement of impatience, but his sister whispered, “Do listen, John. It may help us to find out about Jim.”

“That’s true,” admitted John. “Please go ahead, Steve, and tell us what you mean?”

“I don’t mean anything. I liked her myself well enough, and, as I’ve said to many a one who’s complaining he didn’t understand her, ‘Canadians have just got to make allowance for the English ways of English folk. It’s their bringing-up, and they can’t help it’, says I, but some will have it that there’s something kind of deep and mysterious about her. It isn’t natural, they says, for a real lady—and anyone can see she’s that—to come thumping out here from the city, with the roads as they are, just to be at a country party. The question is, what was she after?”

“She wanted to see Granny.”

“Your Granny’s a wonderful nice lady, Peggy; but the Craigs say—and there’s something in it—that December’s a queer time for the mother of four bits of children to leave ’em to sink or swim, as the saying is, for by all accounts, their father’s head is buried in his books. It’s said she came down here on particular business and used your party as a blind!”

“What business could she have here?” again demanded Peggy in her direct way.

“Haven’t you noticed her everlasting questions? ‘Why do you do this?’ and ‘What do you think about that?’ and did you never see her pencil and black book she’s always a-writing in? What she’s a-hunting is information as to who thinks what, and who thinks that same thing hard enough to be ready to fight for it? That’s what everyone’s saying—but here’s the rub—some says she’s working for Mackenzie, and some that she’s a spy for Sir Francis Head. And they mostly think the last, for it’s known that she was at the big dinner at Government House, and that she and Sir Francis found plenty to say to one another.”

“Cousin Maria! a spy!—well, Steve, you can just tell the next person who says so that he’s—out—of his—mind,” said John very deliberately.

But Stephen went on, (and the cynical smile ceased to wrinkle up his uncomely old face) “True or not, with this story going its rounds, I wasn’t best pleased to see Jim with her in tow. It would a been different with you, John—for everyone knows where you stand, you obstinatest of old Loyalists—but Jim has been going about pretty queer places this summer. They do say—I guess you two ought to know, and Mr. Crane ain’t one to make mischief—that he was seen riding down Market Street in a wagon with Mackenzie, when he was speechifying!”

“He didn’t mean to ride with him. I saw it,” said Peggy. “It was an accident. He was holding on to the wagon listening—like you or John might have done—when some rough fellows tore down the street and wheeled the wagon off. Jim either had to get under it or climb in.”

“Oh, that was it, was it? just a boy’s trick!—and I suppose it was just being boys that took him—and Frank Hurd—to the big meeting at the Haunted House a little over a month ago?”

Peggy nodded and answered, “Yes, I dare say Jim wanted to show them how to shoot; but, Steve, you should be able to remember what a boy is like. And oh! if you know where he is now? or what has happened? tell me, please!”

“I don’t know. I wish I did, for I love you all, Peggy, like my own”—she knew now he was speaking sincerely—“and if I can find out anything on the quiet, I’ll let you know.”

At this John and Tom went one way and Peggy and Robin the other, all disquieted in their own way by the vague rumours they had picked up. Peggy made Robin promise not to repeat Steve’s talk to anyone until she gave him leave, but she herself told the whole story to her parents.

Another day passed, a day when definite information was scarce, but rumours more and more plentiful. The little old shoemaker, Tobin, established himself at Steve’s house by the road, mending shoes for his board and helping zealously to garner all the floating straws of news or gossip that might show how the wind blew. A red light in the sky north of Toronto was interpreted to mean the wholesale burning of Loyalists’ houses, and lurid stories came in of attacks on lonely farmhouses, garrisoned by women, and of the capture of the coach by the rebels near the Peacock Inn on Dundas Street. It was further said that the mail bag had been rifled, the passengers robbed of their money and luggage and the coach taken to the rebel camp.

Of course, news had not then begun to travel by rail, motor car or telegraph. Nevertheless, it made its way with surprising rapidity from mouth to mouth, and on Thursday, December 7th, black columns of smoke and the red reflections of flames in the sky above Toronto added about equally to the alarm of the supporters and the opponents of Government. Late at night, when Peggy and her brother Arthur had braved the walk along the rutty woodland road to seek news from Stephen, whispers were creeping along Dundas Street of a fierce battle near Montgomery’s Tavern, the great inn on Yonge Street some four miles above the city, of flying rebels and of huge rewards offered by Government for their apprehension. Yet amidst all the farrago of rumour and fact, neither Steve nor Tobin could comfort Peggy with one word which might suggest the fate of her missing brother and the lady he had in his charge.

That night Peggy and her father and mother took turns to watch and listen, Jim’s rifle, loaded, lying on the table before the sentinel of the hour. Peggy’s watch began about four o’clock in the dreary morning hours; and her nerves were strangely on edge. Even the familiar creaking sound of the boys turning about in their home-made beds caused her to start, and after an hour of many false alarms she doubted whether she heard or imagined the trampling of footsteps on the now frozen ground near the barn, and the sound of some one working at the door.

At last she determined to investigate and, picking up the rifle, crept into the shed, softly opened the shutter of its unglazed window, and listened intently. At any rate the sounds were real, and, letting her gun carefully down to the ground outside, she climbed through the aperture after it.

But she was not in a rash mood. She advanced through the darkness to the barn with Indian-like precaution, guided by that mysterious trampling. Strange how noiseless Peggy could be upon occasion! But the other feet belonged, it seemed, to people who had no objection to being heard. Prudence urged her back. Curiosity impelled her to go forward. She kept on moving inch by inch, and had still some four or five yards to travel when one of the creatures she was stalking gave a sudden cough, and it was not a human cough at all.

Peggy hurriedly groped her way back to where the firelight in the distant kitchen imparted a faint red glow to the woodshed window to get her gun. Returning towards the barn, she put out her hand before her as if playing “Blind Man’s Buff”, and grasped at the rough, very damp, coat of an ox—surely one of John’s pets. “Buck!” “Bright!” she called softly, and there was a shuffling of feet and the two great heads swung towards her—as if expecting a caress. Peggy dropped the gun, opened the barn door and the beasts went in as if they knew their home. The girl closed the door, mechanically picked up the rifle, and ran to the house in a tumult of feeling which was more fear than joy. Why had the oxen come home without Jim? Where was he? What had happened to Cousin Maria?

THE GREEN CARPET BAG.

In eager haste Peggy roused her parents, and her mother, taking the lantern, went with her to make sure that the beasts in the barn were in very truth their own Buck and Bright.

When they came back Peggy in great excitement exclaimed, “Father, there is no doubt that they are our own oxen. I know every mark on them, and they know us. You should have seen the way old Buck kept poking his big nose against mother’s hand, looking as if he were just aching to tell her where he had been. Oh, I wish—I wish he could.”

They had drawn the embers together and built up the fire, and for half an hour they sat in anxious consultation over this new turn of affairs.

“I have an idea,” said Peggy suddenly. “Perhaps we can find out by the foot-prints where they came from.”

“That might give the clue,” said Mr. Lydgate.

“They are as wet as if they had swum the creek,” remarked Mrs. Lydgate.

“That may be another clue. But who can go?” asked the blind man.

“I will, father. The ground is half frozen now, and I’m sure the tracks will be clear as far as the main road at any rate; but it looks and feels like snow. Suppose I go out with the lantern, mother, to see which way they came from, and then I’ll start directly it’s light.”

Mrs. Lydgate had breakfast almost ready when Peggy again burst into the room, talking fast and excitedly.

“I’ve found the marks, father, as plain as plain, but evidently they haven’t come home by Dundas Street. I do believe they have come across the Creek, but it’s exactly opposite from the way Jim started.”

“This is Friday,” said Mrs. Lydgate. “They have had time to wander a good way since Tuesday.”

“That’s true,” agreed Peggy, “but at any rate I’m sure the thing to do is to follow up the trail.”

“Well, Peggy, if you are going—and I don’t know what better can be done—you must take Arthur with you,” said Mrs. Lydgate. “Get your breakfast. You must be starving, child, and I’ll wake the boy and tell him to hurry.” Peggy followed her mother out of the room.

“Mother, I don’t like to go and take Arthur too. If anything happened, what would you do with father and Granny and the two little fellows? I can go alone, or take Bertram.”

“We shall be all right. I’m not afraid, and I’d rather you had Arthur. He is so much bigger and stronger than Bertram.”

Arthur, a manly little fellow of thirteen, was delighted to have a share in such a strange quest, and many a time before it was over, Peggy was thankful to have a companion so cheery and alert.

They tracked the hoofmarks through the woods along the edge of the ravine for a mile or more without much difficulty, though some times they doubled back on themselves provokingly. Then they lost them on a swampy spot, and it was Arthur who, after an anxious half hour, picked up the trail. It came straight, as the nature of the ground would permit, from the brink of the turbid stream.

“Poor old fellows, they must have had their troubles getting up that stiff bank,” said Arthur.

“I wish we could cross, but we can’t. We shall have to go down to Dundas Street. But we might run in and tell mother that the beasts came over the river as she thought.”

“We will; but first, Peggy, look here. Aren’t we nearly opposite Saxby’s old barn? It may save time on the other side, if we decide just where to start our search for the marks.”

So it worked out. Going round by the bridge involved a walk of over three miles, and three miles’ quick walking over half-frozen mud was hard work. But, to Arthur’s great satisfaction, they found that the oxen had descended into the ravine just where he expected. “You see they could get down quite easily at this spot, and in most places they couldn’t,” he remarked.

Peggy was staring so hard at the hoofmarks that she did not hear. Then she stooped and pointed—“No ox made that, Arthur.”

The other amateur detective examined the mark judicially. “No,” was his verdict; “that’s done by a human shoe and no mistake. Some one must have driven them down here.”

“No doubt of it.” Peggy’s tone was decisive.

“Unless it is an old mark?”

Peggy shook her head. “That shoe has trodden out half of one of the hoofmarks. Some one was driving them, sure enough, but he only went into the mud when he had to. Let us see where the steps come from.”

They traced them back along the edge of the ravine for a few yards, then—and here the human foot-prints were much in evidence—the trail turned away from the creek, and ended at a rough shed inside the original farmyard, for though there was a fairly well-beaten road which ran between the tumbledown shed and the old cottage which the squatter, Dixon, had adopted and adapted for his own use, the hoofmarks were no longer visible.

“What do you make of this, Peggy?” asked Arthur.

“I—don’t—like—it. Where’s the wagon? and where’s Jim?”

“Have the Craigs gone to take Toronto, do you suppose?”

“Perhaps, but it’s not the Craigs, it’s the Dixons who live in this place.”

“They must be thieves,” whispered Arthur under his breath. “They must have known that Buck and Bright belonged to us, when they shut them up in the old barn.”

“Hush! Be careful, Arthur boy!”

“If they see us or hear us do you suppose they’ll shoot?” he asked shrinking back towards the bushes.

“No, I don’t think they’ll shoot—why should they? Besides, it doesn’t look as if anyone is here.” And Peggy moved more into the open, and stared at the ugly little windows patched into the old walls.

“Shall we knock at the door and see what happens?” suggested Arthur. “There is some one in. I saw something move at that little window over the door.”

“I believe we’ll go to the Craigs’ first, and see if they know any thing? Some people say that Mr. Craig doesn’t think much of kings and queens, but he was very nice to Granny on Monday night.”

“Steve says he has gone to the war!”

“Does he? Perhaps it is a mistake, and surely some of them will be at home. You see we haven’t found out anything about Jim yet.”

The path to the Craigs’ took them amongst the old out-houses, and there, pushed in between a decrepit wall and a stack of pea-straw, they saw their own wagon. Now-a-days, when wagons are made by the hundred in huge factories it might sometimes be difficult to be sure of your own, but when these vehicles were chiefly home-built they were full of individuality. Any eye could see the difference in the crudely-shaped axles, and the depth and width and construction of the boxes. The moment Peggy and Arthur caught sight of that particular wagon they knew it was the very one in which they rode to church and went marketing to Oakville. But they fairly gasped, coming upon it thus suddenly in a place where it ought not to have been.

They looked over their shoulders to see if any one was observing them, and crept stealthily forward, just as if their own honesty was in question. They touched the wagon gently, perhaps to make sure that in this “haunted” place it was not a phantasm. And then they gasped again, and started away from it, for the front of the box was shattered and splintered as though it had been struck by lightning, or by a charge of heavy shot.

“We won’t go to Craig’s yet,” whispered Peggy. “This looks ugly. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll skirt round in the bushes to the Cranes’. Perhaps they may have heard something.”

They proceeded very cautiously, except that as they circled round the old buildings, Arthur tried to go near enough to the cottage to get a clear view of the little window over the door, and again he insisted, “There is some one moving up there.”

“Let us be quick then, and get out of sight. I want to see the Cranes. They must be horribly lonely, and they may know something of that wagon and Jim.”

It was only a few minutes’ walk from the Saxby house to the back of Mr. Cranes’ property, and Peggy and Arthur ran most of the way. As they approached the door of the “Low place” it flew open, apparently of its own accord, and Ellen almost dragged them in, hugging and kissing Peggy with an eagerness and energy never before displayed by this past mistress of deportment.

“We are starving for news,” she cried. “Milly, Milly, come here!”

“We haven’t any real news. We don’t know anything about the boys or Mr. Crane.” But despite her disclaimer, Peggy and her brother performed a kind of duet of rumours.

“They say the rebels took the coach and robbed the passengers and set fire to the houses in the north of the city,” began Arthur.

“Hundreds of men are gone from Hamilton and Oakville, as well as from the township, to help the Governor,” said Peggy.

“And the talk is that the rebels are beaten and running away,” contributed Arthur.

“The Governor is offering a mint of money—a thousand pounds—to any one who can catch Mackenzie,” added Peggy in a tone of awe, “and nearly as much for some of the others.”

“I wish I had a thousand pounds!” exclaimed Arthur.

“Oh, don’t say that!” protested Peggy with a shudder. “You wouldn’t want to sell a man to his death for any money!”

“No, of course, I shouldn’t,” returned the boy shame-facedly.

“We understand,” and Mrs. Crane put her arm round the little fellow’s shoulders. “So, with all this news, you have heard nothing about any of our own people?”

“Not one word, but I suppose it’s too soon to hear from John and Tom—and your husband. What worries us most, Mrs. Crane, is that we have never heard even from Jim, who set out on Tuesday with Cousin Maria in the ox-wagon to see if he could get some one to take her on to the city.”

“No doubt the disturbances delayed him.”

“Yes, but this morning the oxen came home by themselves—” began Peggy.

“And we followed their hoofmarks to the Creek,” continued Arthur excitedly, “and then we had to go round by the Dundas Street bridge, and the trail ended at the old patched-up barn of the Haunted Farm.”

“The Saxby Farm, close by here—where that man Dixon is living now—” explained Peggy, “and—strangest of all—we found our lost wagon half-hidden in his pea-straw stack, and we think it has been shot at.”

“Oh, I do hope nothing has happened to him. I don’t wonder you’re anxious!” and Mrs. Crane, not knowing what else to say, kissed Peggy again.

“I never did like that Dixon—and I don’t think his master, Craig, is much better,” put in Ellen hotly.

“My dear, would you like me to go with you to Dixon’s, and see if he will tell us anything?” suggested Mrs. Crane. “You would stay here and take care of my sister, would you not, Arthur?”

“Don’t go—either of you,” entreated Miss Crane. “If Dixon would steal the wagon and the oxen, it is not likely he would tell the truth about Jim.”

“It’s most mysterious!” Peggy looked dreadfully puzzled. “But perhaps he isn’t so bad after all, for judging by the tracks some one had driven Buck and Bright to the Creek and started them for home. Why shouldn’t I go myself to talk to him? Why should he want to hurt Jim? But I was forgetting. From the look of the place, we think he may be away. We were going on to the Craig’s, but when we saw our wagon—all splintered—we decided to see first if you had any news.”

“No, we have been shut up here since James started for Oakville. We only go out after dark to feed the poor beasts, and not a soul has been near us. I feel as if we are living at the bottom of a well,” said Mrs. Crane.

“Jim might have left the wagon somewhere, and gone on with Mrs. Lydgate another way,” suggested Ellen. “There may be news of them—and the others—at any moment—especially if the rebels really are beaten.”

“But Jim meant to come back quickly. I know he did.”

“I’ll go with you, Peggy, if you wish,” repeated Milly. “It’s very mysterious!”

“Don’t do anything rash—” Ellen was beginning, when they heard a gentle tap at the kitchen door.

Arthur reconnoitred through a chink from which the mud that served for plaster had fallen out, and reported, “It looks like a woman.”

“Who’s there?” cried Milly.

“Is that you, Mrs. Crane? Oh, please open the door. It’s Mrs. Robert Lydgate.”

“Cousin Maria?” questioned Peggy excitedly.

“Yes, ‘Cousin Maria’. Do be quick. I may be followed.”

There was terror in the still carefully suppressed tones, and Mrs. Crane opened the door without more ado.

A wild-looking figure in a disreputable cotton sunbonnet and an old homespun gown, much too small for her, almost fell across the threshold.

Milly pushed a chair forward, whilst Arthur barred the door, and the girls stared at the apparition, which wore an untidy bandage about the brow. Truth to tell, Peggy could scarcely believe that this was really Mrs. Robert Lydgate. She feared that the appeal for help might be but a cruel ruse to take them at a disadvantage. The vaguely remembered war stories of her father’s and grandfather’s times rendered her suspicious, but Milly’s heart had no room for anything but compassion. She took off the sunbonnet, so as to examine the wounded head.

“Mrs. Crane, don’t trouble yourself with such a disreputable object as I am. I’m not fit to touch,” said the disconcerting apparition with a wave of her hand and a flash of her dark eyes that instantly dissipated her young cousin’s doubts. “Peggy, I can see, thinks I am a particularly unpleasant ghost!”

“Forgive me, Cousin Maria. Oh, what is the matter? Is your head hurt?”

“I was shot at,” replied the lady, in her short way. “Nothing to matter, I think. Unluckily I swooned. The first time I came to myself I was lying at the bottom of one of your terribly bumpy wagons, and I went off again. When my senses returned next time, I was in the most extraordinary bed, in a queer dingy garret; and the owner of the garret had locked the door. I didn’t know where I was, and the woman who came up with some corn mush and water did not dare to tell me. I asked where Jim was and they would not tell that either.”

She paused for breath, and Milly said, “Don’t try to talk if it hurts you.”

“I must talk. I have so much to say. But, first, tell me, is there any news about the doings in Toronto?”

Peggy eagerly repeated those re-assuring rumours.

“What day is this?” was the next question, then returning to the reports of the rebels’ defeat, “I suppose,” she said musingly, “that is why they went off and left my cage door open this morning; but some one had carried off my gown and bonnet, and these rags were all I could find. However, there was one comfort! If I needed disguise, they were an effective one.”

Peggy longed to bring her mind back to Jim, but her eyes were wild, and she pressed her hand against her head as if she hardly knew what she was doing. “Wait, little girl,” whispered Milly. “She’ll be able to talk soon.”

She arrayed Mrs. Lydgate in a clean wrapper, sending Arthur to the barn with the ancient gown and sunbonnet, and gently bathed the wounded forehead. Fortunately the bullet had merely grazed it, and not penetrated the bone. But the bruises incurred during her rough ride after the shooting, the neglect with which she had been treated, her intense excitement and anxiety, and the strain of her final effort to escape through the dreaded unfamiliar woods had all told upon her. She would indeed have had no idea where to turn had she not overheard some remarks of her jailers concerning the Cranes and their unneighbourly ways. And at last her recognition of the wonderful window of “the Low place”, as described by Peggy, had guided her to friends, if not so certainly to safety.

Milly brought her tea and delicate slices of bread and butter and, having eaten, she said briskly, “I was starving. Now I must tell you about our journey. Just beyond the Sixteen Mile Creek, we saw Mr. Craig and another man, with a light wagon, doing something at the harness of their horse—a very good horse, Jim said. They laughed and said something to Jim about going to Toronto. He was not pleased, but I said, ‘Shall I ask them to take me?’ He answered, ‘You had better not. They are hot Patriots’. Soon they passed us, driving furiously, in spite of the horrible roads, and for some reason I noticed a big green carpet bag in the back of the wagon.”

“Ten minutes later we came on that same green bag, one side burst open with the violence of its fall, lying in a pool in the road. Jim jumped down, threw the bag into the wagon, collected a litter of papers that had fallen out of it and stuffed them into my hands. They contained lists of names and addresses, with remarks written in the margin against them. It flashed upon me instantly that the papers were connected with the plot against Government. Jim looked at one sheet and exclaimed, ‘If the rebels fail, there is enough here to hang lots of poor fellows.’ ‘But, if that’s the case,’ said I, ‘we can’t give it back to the men who lost it, or we should be working against the Government’. ‘That’s true,’ said Jim; ‘and a Republic of those fellows’ making would be as bad as the rule of the Compact. But, if we can’t give it back, we must get rid of it at once. Craig’s bound to miss it, if he stops at the Blue Boar, and they’ll be back for it in a hurry. Cousin Maria, we must make for the swamp and drown the thing!’—and he turned into a bush road on the left and urged the oxen to their top speed.”

“It seemed ages before he stopped, dragged off the bag, and made for a muddy pool amongst the trees. I followed, but we worked and worked before that bag would down; and, by the time we had poked it out of sight with long sticks, we were covered with mire from head to foot. We hoped Craig might go along Dundas Street to seek for his lost treasure. Unluckily some papers had sifted out of the wagon at the corner where we turned into the bush, and we were caught, almost—not quite—red-handed.

“Craig was furious, calling us ‘Common thieves!’ and I don’t know what else, but Jim said coolly, ‘You talk of theft, gentlemen. Take it into court, if you please. In the meantime, let us pass, for we have far to go.’ For answer, they levelled their guns at us. ‘Don’t be crazy, Jim,’ replied Craig. ‘Either you or madam has got to tell us what you have done with that bag. If you don’t, we’ll shoot.’ ‘How will shooting help you?’ asked Jim. ‘Don’t trust to that,’ shouted Craig. ‘The lady will tell, if you won’t.’

“ ‘Slip down off the seat, cousin,’ whispered Jim, and with a sudden shout he got the oxen going almost at a rush. I think it frightened their horse, but I don’t know really what happened, for there was a great bang and my head felt as if it was on fire. Next thing I remember (after that dreadful ride in the wagon) was an old woman, fussing about my wretched bed and crying and trying to persuade me to tell about the bag and promising the men would take me straight home, if I would. I’m ashamed to say it, but I wanted so much to get home that I almost told. Only that brave boy’s face haunted me, so I held my tongue. I tried to find out what had happened to him, but the old woman only kept on crying, and—and—Peggy darling, I don’t know anything, but I was proud that day that Jim and I were both Lydgates.”

THE FUGITIVE.

It was late in the afternoon when Peggy, sadly discouraged that she had no better news, set out for home, leaving Arthur with Mrs. Crane and Cousin Maria, ostensibly to look after the cattle, but also to keep a watch for anything that might help in the tracing of Jim. She had intended to make the return trip alone, but Ellen, though terrified by the whole situation, had obstinately insisted that, if Arthur stayed with her sister, she must and would accompany Peggy. The girl did her utmost to dissuade her, for she feared that neither her strength nor her nerves would be equal to the strain. But the more she protested, the more determined was Ellen to “do her duty”. “I know you are afraid I’ll be a burden on you, Peggy,” was her conclusion, “but something tells me I must go, and you know very well that Arthur will be of more use to Milly than I could possibly be.”

That was true, and, after a prolonged farewell, rather suspiciously over-cheerful on both sides, the girls set out through the woods, along the edge of the ravine, at the bottom of which the swollen Creek was racing towards the Lake. They were in the wood, still some distance above Dundas Street, when Peggy said suddenly, “I hope we shall not be stopped. Do you hear that? I’m sure there are soldiers guarding the bridge.”

“We have no reason to be afraid of loyal soldiers,” said Ellen valiantly, “and our men with the King’s force.”

“We don’t know who is holding the bridge,” said Peggy, rather emphatically. “It would be delightful if our own boys were there, only I think they’d rather the rebels had a chance to run. At any rate, there’s one thing I’m sure of, none of them will be wanting to gain those rewards. A curse would rest on money so earned.”

“I bless you for that word,” exclaimed an agitated voice, apparently coming from the ground at her feet.

Peggy jumped and Ellen fled—a yard or two from the track, but both stood still when a little man rose from behind a log and grasped at Peggy’s hand. That was more than she bargained for. She put both hands behind her. “I am a Loyalist,” she said.

“And he whose hand you now refuse to take is none other than William Mackenzie, archenemy of all those traitors to the community, who under the name of Loyalists enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and the ignorant, but true friend and brother to the misguided sufferers (by whatever name they call themselves) preyed upon by the wolves and the scorners. Whither are you going, girl?”

“Home,” replied Peggy, somewhat disturbed when another and a taller shadow arose out of the confusion of wild growth behind her.

“By which road?”

“Dundas Street. We can’t cross the Creek to-night except by the bridge.”

“You cannot go by that road, girl. I do not distrust your will; but how could you women withstand soldiers bound to win the thousand pounds set on the head of the rebel Mackenzie? With such a prize in view they would stop at nothing to force confession from your lips.”

“Why didn’t you rest quiet and let us pass?” demanded Peggy in perplexity. Then, as once before, she was seized with a great, a brilliant idea. But this time, when so much hung upon her care and prudence, she was determined to hasten slowly. “If you had not shown yourselves we could and would have said we had seen no one answering to your description as we came through the woods. Now, the utmost we can do is to refuse to speak.”

“Then—again I say—you shall not go forward,” said the little man resolutely. “Be still. Make no noise, or our blood will be upon your heads just as surely as if you sold our lives for money.”

“It would not seem to me so bad, if we gained nothing from your being taken;” and Peggy’s matter-of-fact tone shocked Ellen inexpressibly.

“Oh, Peggy, it really is too dreadful to think of,” she interposed. “I—I— should feel like Lady Macbeth, when she walked in her sleep, if anything happened to—this gentleman, through our going down to the bridge to-night.”

Mackenzie gave an odd chuckle. “Yes, that’s it—‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten’ a little hand stained with innocent blood. Come, this way. Up the stream.”

“Yes, Peggy, let us go back home. We can’t sell these gentlemen.”

“Wait a moment,” commanded Peggy with severity. “Mr. Mackenzie, I’m not quite certain that your blood is altogether innocent. (Please be still, Ellen; leave this business to me.) If we cry out you are lost. Now I wish to tell you frankly, sir, that in our house, though we know that this country has many wrongs to be righted, we believe you have only added to our troubles by taking up arms, and father thinks some day you will feel the same.”

“Never, never,” said the rebel leader. Yet Mr. Lydgate’s prophecy came true; and many years later Mackenzie confessed that he was fully satisfied that “had the violent movements in which I and many others were engaged on both sides of the Niagara proved successful, success would have deeply injured the people of Canada, whom I then believed I was serving at great risks.”

“Well, I hope you will change your mind,” said Peggy. She was really trying to persuade herself that she was justified in giving the rebel another chance; but she also wanted to make a bargain with him. “I believe I can show you a good hiding-place, where you can rest a while; but I am of the opinion that one good turn deserves another—”

“Surely. But had we not better be walking on?”

“In one moment. Listen. A dear brother of mine, Jim Lydgate, was taking a lady to town last Tuesday, when he was fallen upon and carried off by some of the people who call themselves your followers.”

“It was an act of justice and of self-preservation on their part. I know something of that boy. He came to several of our meetings, but is one of those who put their hands to the plough and turned back, unless, as some believe, he was spying upon us from the first.”

“That is not true. At first, poor boy, he was sure that you were a very Joshua to lead us into a new Land of Promise; but later he saw that you would only bring misery and bloodshed upon us and he promised my father that he would not join you.”

“Well, well, I will look into the thing as soon as may be, and if injustice has been done—”

“We cannot wait. Tell me this instant, where he is and in whose keeping, and give me an order in writing that he is to be set free?”

“Girl, there is no time—”

“There is time. Where is my brother? It is life for life with me. Speak quickly or I shall cry out to the soldiers.”

“The lad was not seized by my orders. But you don’t know all. He had purloined and concealed documents of immense importance. They are holding him only till he will tell what he has done with these papers.”

“Purloined indeed! Jim Lydgate is no thief. But now—yes or no?—will you tell me—Where is he?”

“Hush, speak softly. He is in the keeping of Daniel Craig, as I understand, or his man Dixon. Somewhere on Craig’s farm or the old Saxby place. On my honour, I know no more.” A loud burst of laughter startled them all, for the men (whoever they were) whose mood was so hilarious, were certainly much nearer to them than was the bridge. “I will write the order to Craig as soon as I can find a scrap of paper. Will that satisfy you, woman?”

“It will,” replied Peggy, taking Ellen by the arm. “Come. Follow me as quietly as possible.”

The fugitives had no reason to complain of slackness or inefficiency on the part of their guide. She had been familiar with these woods since she was a little child, and she led the way swiftly amongst the trees, that in the darkness, were so bewildering to a stranger. She kept pretty close, wherever possible, to the edge of the ravine, and the rush of the stream covered the slighter sounds of breaking twigs or stumbling footsteps. But it was an anxious journey. From time to time their movements were quickened by shout answering shout, often at some distance; at last so uncomfortably near that all four stopped instinctively and held their breath.

“Stoop down in the bushes,” whispered Peggy. The men accomplished a masterly disappearance into the blackest of the shadows, but Ellen slipped over a tree-root and came down with such force on her knee that she uttered a sharp little cry just as Peggy had arrived at the conviction that there was some one stalking them, close on their heels.

Ellen’s cry sent a shiver all down her companion’s spine and for half a second she gave her unhappy rebels up for lost. But she promptly called herself “a coward”, and in a low but natural tone asked “What hurt you, Ellen?”

“It’s my knee. It’s a little better. I am so sorry I called out.”

“Never mind. Sit down and rest a minute. We shall soon be at home, that is, if you can walk.” Peggy was perfectly well aware that their pursuer was now very close at hand, but an appeal to his chivalry on behalf of the disabled damsel might even yet distract his attention from their still more distressed protégés. “Who is that?” she inquired calmly.

But the astute diplomatist got the surprise of her life, when a shocked whisper reached her ear, “Peggy Lydgate, for pity’s sake, don’t talk so loud. There’ll be no end of trouble for you, if you are caught here and now.”

“Frank! Where did you spring from? You did give us a fright. Why didn’t you speak before?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said Frank, rather gruffly for him. “Who’s with you?”

Peggy spoke in his ear.

“Peggy!” If ever dismay found expression in one whispered word, it was then.

“I promised. It’s a bargain.”

“Well then, come on. The lower part of the wood is full of Government men and they are working this way. Quick, I’ll help Miss Crane, while you hurry on ahead with the others.”

And hurry they did. The three went through the wood like wraiths, for the avenger of blood was after them. And Ellen and her escort were not many paces behind when Peggy led her rebels into the Cranes’ barn, and bade them conceal themselves in the hay mow till she returned.

In a way the girl was in her element in all this excitement that made such strenuous demands on her powers of mind and body, but poor limp and limping Ellen looked a pitiable object, in the ray of bright light from the window, when Frank helped her up the steps of her brother’s house.

Peggy waylaid them just before they entered to suggest that it would be easier for Mrs. Crane and Mrs. Robert Lydgate, in case the soldiers came to continue the search, if they had not been told that the two rebels were actually in hiding on the premises. “Let us keep out of the way and leave the ones who don’t know anything to do the talking,” she urged.

“I don’t want to talk,” said Ellen rather pettishly. “Surely you won’t try again to-night to get home.”

“Probably not. But you go to bed, Ellen, and get rested. We don’t know what may happen yet.”

Seeing that her sister-in-law was absolutely exhausted, Mrs. Crane seconded this good advice. Nevertheless the little lady was by no means pleased that Frank and Peggy were both so mysterious and uncommunicative. In fact they entreated her not to ask questions just then, but they ventured also to beg for food and tea and bottles of hot water. Milly, famous for her marvellous powers of jumping to conclusions, leaped so close to the truth that she suggested, when she caught the two starting for the barn with the bread and meat that had been provided supposedly for themselves, that it would be “only kind to take a rug or two to Dobbin and the cow as well as the hot water bottles for their feet.”

The conspirators gratefully accepted these comforts for the denizens of the barn and carried them out, after which Peggy roused her little brother and set him to patrol the barnyard and its neighbourhood, hastily explaining that the strangers in the mow were in peril of death and must be warned to escape to the woods on the least sign of danger. Arthur undertook the trust with solemn joy and that night proved himself a worthy descendant of the old Loyalists, though in a cause upon which they would have looked askance.

“I promised to find them a better hiding-place,” Peggy explained to Frank. “Will you come with me to see what we can do?”

“Of course I will. I would go with you anywhere, Peggy.”

“Perhaps we might take them to one of the old smugglers’ secret places. What about that spot that sounded hollow in the old dining-room? Did you ever explore it?”

“Yes. It would be the very thing,” said Frank. “There’s a way to it from the old root-cellar. It’s well-hidden, and I suppose very few people know of its existence.”

“It sounds fine,” said Peggy. “I have a lantern with me under my shawl.”

“We shall have to be very careful, Peggy. Those Dixons are living so close to the ruins.”

“But every one says they are on Mackenzie’s side. Surely they would be glad to help if they could.”

“They might. I don’t trust the Dixons. But we must make haste. The militiamen may be here at any moment.”

“Yes, but Frank, there is something else I want to tell you. Mackenzie says the Craigs know where Jim is. Will you come with me to see them as soon as we have settled about another hiding-place for those two?”

“That I will.”

“I can’t help thinking he is in some dreadful danger.”

“Cheer up, Peggy. We are on his track.”

“What brought you over here, Frank?”

“I’ve been helping dad to beat up recruits for his company; but mother is worried about grandfather and grandmother and I was going back to Toronto, when Beauty fell lame. No wonder, poor beast! so I turned in at your place and found your people in terrible trouble, and your mother sent me to look for you.”

“I’m rather glad,” said Peggy simply.

After that they hurried on in silence, till, reaching the ruins, Peggy ventured to allow one little ray of light to escape from her concealed lantern. And then they made a disconcerting discovery. The secret cellar was no longer secret. It had been broken into from above, and was indeed a trap for the unwary. “That’s hopeless,” said Peggy dismally. Somehow she had had it in her romantic mind that they might find Jim in the underground chamber.

In her eagerness to make sure that he was not there, she exposed her light rather recklessly, and to her amazement its rays fell on the huddled-up figure of a woman, who was watching them intently from the opposite side of the chasm. But Peggy was glad to see anything human that she might question. Marching round the edge of the old cellar, she flashed her light into her face and demanded, “Mrs. Dixon, where is my brother, Jim Lydgate?”

“Who knows where any one is these days?—sons, brothers, husbands. My Jim has gone to his death, they tell me, but Daniel Craig, who led him into this mischief, is safe across the border.”

“Look, here’s a line from Mr. Mackenzie, telling any one that’s keeping Jim Lydgate to let him go.” (Peggy had got this when they took the provisions to the barn.)

“I can’t read writing, and I’ve done with Mackenzie for good and all. He’s got lots of poor wretches into trouble, like my Jim. Go and look for yours, where you like.” The woman spoke wildly, but glanced, the girl thought, towards the cottage. As they hurried away, they heard the poor creature shrieking hysterically. Her cries brought to the door a little girl, whom Peggy recognized. “Tell me, Hannah,” she said gently, “is my brother here?”

“There’s some one upstairs,” answered the child. “I don’t know who, but he’s very sick. He’s calling all the time, ‘Water, water!’ ”

“I’ll take it. Go to your mother, dear. Perhaps she’ll come in for you.”

Frank went with Peggy up to the wretched garret, and Jim (for it was he) stared at them and did not know them. “Peggy dear, don’t lose heart,” said Frank. “You stay with him and I’ll see to your rebels and be back in double quick time.”

AN UNCANNY APPARITION.

The first hour of Peggy’s watch beside her delirious brother was made more intolerable by the wild ravings of the widow and the wailing of her neglected children in the room below, but as the night wore on they became quieter.

Peggy had neither food nor medicine, fresh bandages nor bed-linen for her patient, and there was almost nothing that she could do for him except give him water when he cried out for it. She thought he was dying, but over and over again she repeated, “Dear God, help poor Jim.”

As she sat watching, she began to feel as if she were part of a horrible dream. The little draughty room under the roof was patched up with all kinds of spoil from the ruins and, in the flickering light from her lantern, the beams in the ceiling seemed to waver and the ugly stains and patches on the partition walls, as she gazed, seemed to turn into uncanny shapes and shadows.

Presently Jim too grew quieter, and his sister, crouching on the floor beside him, stiff and chilled to the bone in spite of a heavy coat which Frank had taken from his own shoulders and forced her to put on, Peggy almost lost the sense of where she was and what she was doing. Suddenly she heard steps on the rickety ladder and thought, with a sigh of relief, “Frank at last!”

But it was not he. Peggy stared in astonishment at the grotesque figure in the doorway, clad in the very hideous cotton sunbonnet and the ragged homespun gown that had been worn in the morning by her classical cousin’s lady.

“Cousin Maria, is it you?”

The apparition shook its head, and the girl caught a glimpse of a pair of wild eyes and a strangely working mouth that clearly did not belong to Mrs. Robert Lydgate. Thoroughly mystified, Peggy continued to gaze, till the thing bent over the bed and muttered hoarsely, “Wake up, Jim Lydgate, wake, I say!”

Jim made not the slightest response, but the harsh, too-carrying voice effectively roused his guardian. “Stop, stop, don’t wake him,” she exclaimed angrily. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The intruder turned towards her, saying with solemnity, “Peggy Lydgate, I must know what the boy has done with the green carpet bag. If it falls into wrong hands, it will mean ruin to many.”

She flashed her lantern full on the face framed in the sunbonnet and knew it for that of the rebel whom she had spared—almost against her conscience.

“He is past telling you anything,” she answered passionately. “Go. If he dies it is you who will have to answer for his death.”

“I must wake him. Jim! Jim Lydgate!” and Mackenzie laid his hand heavily on the sleeper. “I tell you, girl, those papers are of more importance than any ordinary life.”

“Go. Go,” insisted Peggy, clutching his arm.

He tried to shake her off.

“Listen,” she muttered. “The soldiers! Are you mad? I hear them, I tell you. Leave this room instantly. I will not save you a second time. Go, or I will call out to them.”

Mackenzie straightened himself, pushing up the sunbonnet on one side that he might hear the better. For a moment he had thought Peggy’s cry of “The soldiers!” just a bluff; but now he realized that the pursuers were on his track.

“Call out from the window,” he said with a grimace. “If I am to be taken, why shouldn’t you get the thousand pounds as well as another?”

“You are mad,” cried Peggy, in a rage. “As if I would touch that money! There are lots of holes and corners in this crazy place. Crawl in somewhere. Why did you come to trouble us again?”

“Those papers,” said Mackenzie, “and some one put temptation in my way in the shape of this disguise. Shall I risk trying its virtues on those fellows below?”

Peggy stamped her foot. “Don’t be foolish,” she cried, and holding her lantern now high, now low, she scanned every possibility of hiding in the patched-up little room. “There, there,” and she pointed to a spot, almost at the level of the floor, against which the porch of the original cottage broke out into a fancy gable, leaving a small triangular recess. Across this a few rough boards had been carelessly nailed. “Come here,” she said imperiously. “Help me to pull off this lower board, then you can crawl in there. Be quick, they are poking about the ruins now.”

Between them they pulled off the board. It gave way with a disconcerting snap, and with difficulty, Mackenzie crept into the recess, but his movements raised so much ancient dust that he had hard work to smother a cough that might have been his undoing.

Peggy, still angry but determined that neither she nor any one else (if she could help it) should win that thousand pounds, passed water to him to check the extraordinary sounds he was making in his throat, directed him where to ensconce himself so as to take advantage of the blackest shadows and with hands and feet noiselessly pressed back the old board into position.

“It’s a mercy,” this from the irrepressible fugitive in a hoarse whisper, “that I’ve got on this woman’s gear over my own, or I should freeze to death in here.”

“Hush, hush,” returned Peggy. “Can’t you hold your tongue when your life depends upon it? Not another word; but I will let you know, if I possibly can, when all is safe again.”

“Thanks, thanks. I’ll never forget your kind—”

“Please be quiet. But I’ll tell you this—I don’t forget it was you, who gave us Volume One of ‘The Talisman’, and for that I’m glad to help you.”

Mackenzie chuckled and subsided, not so much on account of her entreaties, but because a thundering rap on the old door just beneath him, gave warning that his pursuers had not wearied of the search. The rap was repeated and a loud voice shouted “Open, in the King’s name.”

The noise provoked an answering hubbub within. The children and their mother screamed with fright; but, to Peggy’s terror, Jim paid no attention to the dreadful outcry. He neither spoke nor moved. His sister was in despair, till it suddenly occurred to her—this was the help he so sorely needed. Jim was suffering for his loyalty, and Loyalists would take him to safety.

She hastily descended the ladder to find the kitchen full of armed men, trying to extract information from the terrified widow and children. But Peggy did not wait for the militia captain, whose face was half-familiar, to speak to her. She confronted him and plunged headlong into her tale.

“Please, sir, help me. I have found my brother here wounded. We could get no news of him after he left home on Tuesday to try to get our cousin, the lady of the new Classical Master at Upper Canada College back to her family in Toronto. That American, Craig, shot at him and kept him here a prisoner in a garret where he will get his death of cold. Please, please help me to take him away. You know me, don’t you, Captain Anderson?” Peggy had suddenly remembered the name of the burly Hannahsville farmer; but he found it difficult to follow the flow of her eloquence.

“What’s this you say? Who are you, Miss?”

“Peggy Lydgate. Lesley Lydgate’s daughter. We live just across the Creek from here.” More slowly she told her tale again, and the facts of it began to shape themselves into a sort of meaning in the captain’s mind. But, before he could answer, one of his men, whom the others called Mick, and who was especially eager to make sure of the promised reward for the capture of the rebel leader, said roughly, “Let the girl wait. While she talks, Mackenzie may escape us after all.”

Under the circumstances, Peggy had a particular objection to being catechized, so she played a bold game and paying no attention to the interruption, again besought the captain to come up and see her wounded brother.

“Where is he?” asked Anderson.

She led the way up to the garret and, as she expected, several of the militiamen followed. She guessed, however, that most of them were not more eager than herself to see the fugitive captured.

The captain looked intently at the wounded boy, saying, “Hallo, do any of you fellows know where the doctor is? This lad is in a pretty bad way, I’m thinking.”

One of the men answered, “He’s on the hunt with the rest, somewhere about the old place. Shall I find him?”

“Do,” replied Anderson. Then he turned to the others. “See any sign hereabouts of the old fox, lads?”

At that instant Jim began to moan and toss about, and Peggy, re-arranging the ragged quilts, lest he should be chilled, made as if she was unaware of the movements of the men in the tiny room. Yet somehow she knew perfectly well that Mick was on his knees behind her glaring into the triangular recess; and she could hardly refrain from turning round to see what was happening. But she was afraid to face the light lest some one should read the secret in her eyes.

Every moment she expected to hear Mackenzie cough or fidget, for she had small opinion of his discretion. Finally she was convinced she could hear his breathing, and she almost laughed with sheer relief, when a newly-arrived Englishman said, “What’s the trouble, Mick? You are puffing like one of them new-fangled steam-engines they are using in England to save coach-horses. Think you’ve got him?”

“Reminds me of a dog with his nose in a rat-hole,” observed another. “Are you going to stick there on your knees all night, man? Mackenzie may be a little bit of a fellow, but he’s got a fine big head on him, and he couldn’t get in between those cracks no-how.”

Mick rose with a disappointed air. “No, I suppose not,” he admitted.

He lurched down the ladder, just as the doctor (turned soldier for the time) came to see Jim. He made a hasty examination, and said, “He’s in bad shape to move, but we must get him out of this, or he’ll die of cold,” and to Peggy’s satisfaction he speedily made arrangements to take the still-unconscious lad to the Cranes’.

Just as they were leaving Dixon’s cottage, Frank, who had been pressed into service to carry a message for Anderson, joined the party, and contrived to tell Peggy what had kept him and to hear her story. Afterwards, when the coast was clear, he guided Mackenzie and his younger comrade through the bitterly cold waters of the neighbouring stream, now thick with drifting ice, to the house of a friendly Scotch farmer, who gave them a meal and dry clothing and volunteered to lead them to a spot where the Twelve Mile Creek could be crossed on a fallen tree.

We can follow the fortunes of the rebel leader no farther, except to say that, owing to the faithfulness of many friends and the generosity of not a few political opponents, he succeeded in effecting his escape to the United States. There he spent a dozen years in exile and poverty. He was then suffered to return to Canada; and lived long enough to see the dawn of a new era of liberty and fair government in the country which (whatever his mistakes) he had loved much and had sincerely tried to serve.

THE OLD GHOSTS LAID.

A year and a half had gone by, since the cold December night when Peggy guided the fugitives through the woods beside the Sixteen Mile Creek to Mr. Crane’s barn. Now it was June and the warm sunshine of the early evening was filtering through the young green of the leaves. Birds were flitting and twittering and singing amongst the branches. The Creek, not yet shrunk to its summer proportions, was gently crooning as it slipped onwards toward the Lake. The ground, that had seemed so rugged, so absolutely hostile on that night when a stumble might have meant death to the flying rebels, was now carpeted with flowers. And the two girls, who on that memorable pilgrimage had been so anxious and so weary, were strolling easily along, talking in pleasant intermittent fashion and stopping, whenever the fancy took them, to add to the sheaves of the many-coloured blossoms that filled their hands.

“I’ve always thought June a lovely month since I was a little girl at school,” said Ellen, smiling dreamily. “You have been so free, Peggy. You cannot guess what it is like to get out of a dull old school-room (where you spend nearly all your waking hours) into the sunshine. But there never was a lovelier June than this, though my little school-room here is quite different from those grim old ones, where I ground away my childhood.” For over a year Miss Crane had “kept school” and boarded in Steve’s little cottage on Dundas Street, and sometimes she had as many as fifteen pupils, ranging from small children to young men and women.

“Surely, Ellen, you are not going to tell me that you ever thought a school-room dull,” laughed Peggy. “At any rate your pupils don’t. You have worked some magic on Bertram so that even he likes a bit of book-learning and, as for Robin,—well, of course he took kindly to books from the day we brought home ‘The Talisman’.”

Ellen smiled, but there was something rather mysterious in her manner. Once or twice she opened her lips to speak, but closed them again without saying anything. At last she broke out, “You know, Peggy, how I love my teaching. I never have thought of Steve’s little room as a school-room at all, but I’ve been pulled two ways all this last week. What should you say”—Miss Crane looked down at her flowers with a rising colour—“I wonder what you would say if I told you that—some one wants me to give it all up.”

“I know,” cried impulsive Peggy. “It’s John. I am so glad.”

“Who told you?”

“No one. I just knew”; and Peggy caught her friend round the waist and hugged her and pranced a little.

Released, Ellen settled her disarranged tucker and, looking solemnly into Peggy’s laughing eyes, said, “It’s a very serious step to take. I believe, in my conscience, I ought to have said, ‘No’.”

“Then you did say, ‘Yes’?”

“He wouldn’t listen to ‘No’. Don’t laugh, Peggy. I’m dreadfully worried lest some day he should wish I’d just kept on with the school. I’ve been thinking ever since—I’m no good at anything but teaching, and that’s not enough. I’d rather be lonely all my life than let John be unfair to himself.”

Peggy looked puzzled. “But John wants it, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he thinks he does; but you know, Peggy, I never have been able to do a single thing well except teaching.”

“That’s exaggerating. When it comes to making soap, and candles, Ellen—”

“Oh, do be serious, Peggy. John’s so good—”

Peggy did not really know what line she was expected to take. At last she remarked brusquely, “If you’ve come to think so little of your teaching, Ellen, I don’t see what you can do but go back to learning; and perhaps there would be no better way of doing that than getting married—to dear old John.”

Ellen seated herself, thoughtfully, on a fallen tree, and Peggy dropped down beside her.

“Peggy,” began the elder girl, after a moment’s silence, “I talked to your father last night, and (I hope you won’t mind it,) he said, ‘Then after this, Peggy will not be our only girl.’ Wasn’t it lovely of him to take it that way?”

Peggy couldn’t say ‘Yes’, for it gave her rather a shock. She sprang to her feet, wishing that Ellen would not gaze at her so. But she had a secret of her own, and she knew she ought to be glad that her father could welcome Ellen into the family so wholeheartedly. She would be glad. She— Well, there didn’t seem much to say just then, but she took both Ellen’s hands in hers and bent with a serious face to kiss her. Then she drew away a little and looked at her as she sat in the sunlight and wondered how she could have been so stupid as to think her a middle-aged woman, in that long-ago time, when they first became friends, two and a half years ago.

The two were on their way to the Cranes for supper, but Peggy did not stay long after the meal was over, for she knew that Ellen must be wishing to tell her brother and his wife of her engagement.

Once well out of sight from the “Low place”, she strolled slowly up the Creek to that season’s rustic bridge, formed by a tree that had grounded in a convenient spot, when the spring floods were subsiding. Instead of crossing it she sat down on the bank and was in a brown study, when she heard Frank’s voice, close beside her, “Peggy, what are you dreaming of?”

“Of old times,” she answered.

“I want to talk to you about new times, present and to come,” he said. “The best of the evening is yet to come and they know I’m meeting you, so let us go back a little.”

“Why, Frank?” said Peggy, rising.

“The mosquitoes are too excited and exciting down here. I want to tell you about a notion of father’s. Now, sit down there, where I can see your face, for it talks often just as plainly as your tongue.”

Peggy perched on a stump, and Frank stood looking down on her, as she had stood, looking down on Ellen. “Was there ever such a slow boy when it comes to explaining things?” she murmured.

“I’m not ready to explain till I’ve asked you two or three very solemn questions. First, when we are married, Peggy, shall you be satisfied to settle down in Toronto and become a fine city lady?”

Peggy looked up quickly. “Is it in me to become a fine city lady? But as for living in the city, I suppose I shall have to be content with that if I can’t be content without—you.”

“Once you said Toronto was like fairyland.”

“Did I? That was the first time I saw it, Wasn’t it? But often these woods are more like fairyland.”

“And you like the woods best?”

“I’m going to love the city, too. I know I am, only—only I wish it was not so far away.”

“Question three—Where would you live (if you could choose, Peggy) when we are married?”

“What does it matter, Frank, if there is no choice? You have my promise. Isn’t that enough?”

“Just this one question, Peggy—where would you choose?”

“You know, Frank, without my telling. I’d like to live and die in Trafalgar Township, if that could be. (You always seemed to belong to the life here too.) And I’d like it best of all, if we could stay near father and mother and the rest. But then, you have to think of your grandfather and grandmother. They have been so good to you.”

“I should say they have, Peggy, better than any one knows except myself. But suppose it happened that one of my brothers wanted his turn in Toronto with grandfather and that he fitted in with his ideas better than I can in some ways—”

“Oh, Frank, it would be lovely; and I can see from your face that it isn’t only ‘suppose’.”

Frank laughed. “There’s something else, Peggy. If it should happen that the old lawsuit about the Saxby Farm suddenly ended—”

“It never will. Someone always digs up something to start it again when anyone says it’s going to be settled. Besides, what has that to do with you and me?”

“Peggy, the lawsuit is settled, and father has bought the Saxby place. He didn’t have to pay too much for it, either—”

“Your father? Bought the Saxby Farm and the Old Court and everything?”

“Yes; and he wonders whether you would be afraid of the ghosts, because if not, and if we care to try our hands at farming, he says he’ll rebuild the house for us and help us to start and make it easy for us to buy the place. It’s a fine chance for us; but seriously now, Peggy, would those old ghost stories make you unhappy?”

Peggy couldn’t sit still. Indeed her feet began to dance, and the laughter in her eyes belied her promise to be very serious. “Isn’t it enough to make one solemn?” she cried. “When you think of the wind shrieking and howling in the old chimney, the bats flying round our heads on evenings like this, can you be sure we shall not feel creepy? Why, there are times when the very swish of the trees in a gale makes one see the ladies in their stiff silk gowns, who used to come to the Colonel’s parties.”

“Very well, Peggy, I’ll tell father that you don’t fancy having a house that you might have to share with those old dames. He’ll be a bit disappointed, but—”

“What about you, Frank?” Peggy suddenly became really serious. “Do you think you would really like settling down in this eerie old place after living for so many years in town in that dear pretty, white cottage?”

“But, Peggy, it won’t be an eerie old place any longer after those wretched patched-up sheds are torn down and the front part of the house is re-built. I was so sure you would be delighted with the chance of settling down near your people, that I practically said ‘yes’ to father off-hand.”

“Then, for yourself, Frank,” Peggy began, “you—”

The young man interrupted her. “For myself, Peggy, I am not superstitious. I can promise you that I shall see no ghosts, unless you manage to raise them with your queer fancies.”

Peggy nodded cheerfully. “I know. I do have queer fancies and I might raise a ghost, accidentally. But the absurd thing is, I think I rather like feeling creepy. And now, I’ll tell you—I’m just crazy with joy at the thought of having this lovely old place for our very own. It seems like a story-book come true. I was just making quite, quite sure that you wanted it too.”

Frank made it very clear that he did want it, saying at length, “Now, Peggy, let us go and take another look at the old ruins. It’s dark enough to give the ghosts a chance, should they wish to warn us off.”

So they went slowly up the narrow path, making a little circuit to avoid crossing Mr. Crane’s farm, for they did not want to be called in to see their friends just then. Instinctively they kept their voices low and chose the shadows to walk in, reminding Peggy of that other night walk through these same woods. “Frank,” she said softly, “it makes me think of the time you followed us when we were trying to get Mr. Mackenzie away from his pursuers and Ellen shrieked. I believe that was the very creepiest moment of my life.”

“It was horrible. I’ve always wondered—why did you take Ellen? You might have known she’d get into trouble in some way.”

“I did know. She came—of herself.”

At that moment, Peggy stumbled against a stone, and Frank caught her hand, fearing lest she should precipitate herself into the old cellar. After that, they wandered amongst the dilapidated buildings, hand in hand, like children.

“I’m glad the chimney is as good as ever,” remarked Peggy, regarding that landmark critically. “I shall love to see it with the flames roaring up it on a winter’s night.”

“I’m glad it’s all decided, Peggy,” replied Frank cheerfully, “and it doesn’t look as if the old inhabitants are intending to object to our taking possession.”

“Hush, look there!” and Peggy pointed.

“What, have the ghosts not gone after all?” he whispered, as a slim, black shape passed noiselessly along the path they had just left. Peggy stared, then laughed softly. “That ghost is just restless from happiness, I believe. It’s Ellen;” and she told the news, greatly enjoying her lover’s astonishment.

“John and Ellen Crane!” he exclaimed. “Wonders will never cease.”

“They will be saying that of us, Frank, just as soon as the news gets out. It will be—‘Frank Hurd and Peggy Lydgate! What can he see in a wild tomboy of a girl like that?’ ”

“I don’t care what people say.”

“But you know they will say it,” jeered Peggy.

“I’m not a prophet.” The young man took refuge in this incontrovertible statement. “But whatever they say, you know you are and always have been the only girl for me.”

Tobin and the rival gossips of the neighbourhood certainly found a good deal to say concerning both engagements and the incidental excitements they involved.

Simon Hurd threw himself with his accustomed energy into the task of making the Old Court habitable, in which he had the able assistance of that amateur architect, James Crane. The latter succeeded in convincing the Hurds, much to Peggy’s satisfaction, that the massive stone chimney must be regarded as the key to the plan of reconstruction, and the house was restored, as far as possible, though on a somewhat smaller scale, on the lines of the old Colonel’s original dwelling. The big dining-room was not reduced in size, and from this grew the suggestion that the two weddings should be celebrated on the same day in this “hall”, as Jim and other students of Scott had dubbed it. It was probably the largest room in any private house in the county, and the neighbours felt quite uplifted about it, as the work of restoration proceeded.

“It didn’t seem right to spoil it, mother,” protested Peggy, when Mary Lydgate observed that it would “cost a world of trouble to keep it in order.”

“There are so few large rooms in this part of the country,” she continued, “except those in the Blue Boar and one or two other taverns. It will be a grand place for a service or a party; and it’s so lovely, I shall enjoy knowing it’s there, even if we don’t use it much.”

“Peggy, Peggy, you are just like your father. What shall I do without you?”

“You might have called it doing without me, dear, if we had gone to live in Toronto,” answered Peggy, “but now you’ll be seeing me all the time, and isn’t it nice that John is building his little house so near our dear old place?”

Mary kissed her and they stood, with their arms round each others’ waists, studying the room in silence. “It’s a white elephant, and no mistake,” said Mary with a smile, “but I think the Township’s better satisfied you didn’t pull it down.”

“The Township would never have forgiven us, if we had,” said Peggy laughing, then she went to find her father and led him along the length and breadth of the hall, stopping now and then to describe how they had reglazed the old windows, and furbished up the ancient fireplace.

“Peggy, I can see it all,” he cried. “Many was the merry evening I spent here before the war. It all comes back. The sleigh-loads of fine folk out from Toronto—York it was then; the long table shining with silver; the Colonel in his scarlet coat, holding up his wine-glass and drinking to the King. It was the wine that was his ruin and that of many another of those fine fellows. But I have no right to look down on them, Peggy, for in those days I drank my glass with the rest.”

“Well, daddy dear, I like to think you can fancy it all; but you’ll have to make a new picture in your mind, for Frank thinks that, if we once began having wine or whiskey here, with all the crowd this room would hold, it would soon be as bad as any tavern—as bad as it used to be, when the smugglers brought up their kegs of whiskey from the shore.”

When the finishing touches had been put to the rehabilitation of the Old Court, Jim organized a company of young boys to provide seats for the expected guests (amongst whom by the way were the once-dreaded cousins and all their children) and to decorate the hall for the double wedding.

Jim, who, since his “accident” had been obliged to give up much of his outdoor work and had devoted his time largely to study, was in a position to command all the help he desired, for he had taken Ellen’s place as teacher of the school in Steve’s cottage, and it was growing apace. None of the pupils, however, were permitted to discover how much hard toil it cost their master to keep well ahead in the paths of learning. The race was fiercer because his ambition kindled theirs, but they all made a holiday of those strenuous days of preparation for the bridal festivities.

The October evening was cold to frostiness when the guests assembled, but Jim had lighted a beautiful fire on the great hearth, and it so illumined the whole place that the minister had no need of the two fine candles specially made and placed to shine upon his book.

The red light played hide-and-seek on the dark rafters; glanced on the cousins and friends and neighbours come, all in their best, to see the weddings; and touched the fathers and mothers and grandmothers of the party with a gentleness that lent dignity and beauty to the lines that life had worn into their faces. It shone boldly on broad-shouldered grave-eyed John, danced about the slighter, more boyish figure of the other bridegroom, and kissed both brides, who looked beautiful, as every one agreed, in their wonderful, full-skirted white dresses and veils that made an ethereal background for bright eyes, blushing cheeks and dark, clustering curls. Peggy’s hair, always having had a mind of its own, managed to get into picturesque disorder before she reached her place in the bower of autumn leaves at the end of the hall, but Ellen’s ringlets, composed and elegant, remained till the end of the evening a monument to Milly’s skill in achieving them from perfectly straight locks.

After the ceremony came the feast and the wedding-cake; the fun and the jollity. Then the inspiring music of the fiddles set every one to dancing; Simon Hurd led out Cousin Maria, and stiff-jointed old Steve found a congenial partner in “Mrs. Robert’s” small eldest daughter. When the dancers stopped for breath, Mary started the songs that every one knew; and later there were the time-honoured speeches, packed full of good wishes for the bridal couples, who, it may be said, came as near to “living happy ever after”, as any one, out of a fairy tale, can hope to do.

Thus at last the ugly ghosts, which had so long haunted the Old Court were laid, or rather when, owing to Peggy’s queer fancies, they did occasionally come back, it was as the jolliest and drollest of elves to amuse her children and their chums.

Even the transmuted ghost stories did not delight those story-loving young people quite so much as two “really true” stories of Peggy’s youth. The first had, in some sort, William Lyon Mackenzie for its hero, for it was the thrilling narrative of how he had flung “The Talisman” from the top of the coach and had so set going a chain of events that had changed life for the Lydgate family.

The other was told by a little old man, with eager eyes and restless mouth, who one night came, an unexpected guest, to Saxby Court.

After supper, before the children went to bed, he related the remarkable history of the “Apparition in the Sunbonnet”, and of the girl who did not believe in rebellion, but twice saved a hard-pressed rebel from his pursuers. “Now,” said the story-teller suddenly when the round-eyed children drew breath after hearing how the poor fugitives had crossed their own Creek, through grinding chunks of ice, to safety, “now I’ll tell you the name of that brave girl, and I want you to remember it—Peggy Lydgate!”

“Peggy Lydgate?” echoed Robin of the second generation, then shrieked, “Why, that was mother!”

The stranger nodded; “And the man she saved was William Lyon Mackenzie.”

“You, sir?” questioned the boy, with another inspiration.

“Yes, me, sir; and God bless her for it.”

“She must have been glad,” spoke up Robin the Second. “We know—she’s told us, how you threw ‘The Talisman’ at her; and changed the lives of all the Lydgates.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

When nested quoting was encountered, nested double quotes were changed to single quotes.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of The Only Girl: A Tale of 1837 by Emily Poynton Weaver]