beauty, the sky without a cloud and full of stars, and the boat went in a white shining sea, with the wind full in her sails, just as much wind as was needed and no more. There was a little gurgling of water at the helm, and except that no sound at all; and at first when they put away from the land, Margaret sat still and silent looking on Duncan, and Duncan sat holding the sheet and rudder and looking on Margaret, and there seemed to be no need of speech between them. The little coracle kept going on steadily and quietly, and Isle Aranmore grew smaller and more distant, and at last the black-waved lines of it were no longer to be seen, and it seemed that the two were alone in a great ocean of small white shining waves. "Are

you

afraid, Margaret?" said Duncan, in a low voice. "No," said Margaret, in the same tones, "I was never so little afraid. Are you not cold, Duncan, without your plaid? See; I do not need it any longer." "Draw it about you, Margaret," said Duncan; "I was never so far from cold or trouble in my life." They went on speaking after that, and Duncan found that all that was in his mind was also in Margaret's, and Margaret found that all Duncan's thought was as it were the key to her own heart. It seemed most wonderful. "If the wind were to grow strong," said the girl, "we should be upset and drowned." "Yes," said Mr Duncan, "it is likely. But I have no anxiety for it, Margaret. It is God's wind, and I think

He will give no more of it than we need and no less." So they spoke together, and all the time the boat went on steadily and quietly in the white sea. By-and-by there came the fresh breath of the dawn, and the moon faded, and what had been shining white became faintly coloured, and the sky began to glow till a warm ruddy light fell on the water, and on the faces of the man and the maid in the little coracle. The cold bare fronts of the Rhu Rannoch rocks seemed like lines of fire, and as the boat came near to them the gulls came crying to meet it, wheeling and flashing their wings in the light of the sun. And all the time, from the hour that Mr Duncan put up the sail below the braeside of Isle Aranmore till he took it down in a creek of his own native place, the wind never changed, but kept the sails full, and the sea had a gentle ripple upon it, like the surface of a quiet bay. And all the strange beauty that had been about them since they set out, and the love that was in their hearts for one another, and the sense they had of the providence of God in watching over them all the long distance in the frail vessel, wrought in Duncan and Margaret a kind of exalted joy, so that when they came to the shore at Rhu Rannoch it hardly seemed to them that they stepped on common earth.

It was about seven in the morning when they landed, and after Mr M'Coll had moored the boat in a quiet pool that was like red gold he led Margaret to the top of a heather

ridge that was above the landing-place. But there he stood suddenly still and put his hand to his eyes, like a man dazed and awaking from sleep. There was a little hollow there, in the shadow of the hill, and in it a small, poor, thatched house, with smoke rising from one of the chimneys. There was a field before the door with corn in it, reaped and gathered into little stooks, and there was a byre joined to one end of the house and a peatstack leaning to the other end. Margaret took particular note of all this, because the sight of it seemed to have a strange effect on Mr M'Coll. He stood there staring in front of him; he seemed for the moment to have lost his great strength, and his massive frame shook as with some trouble. "What is it, Duncan?" she asked him, "what is it?" The lad turned to her with kind of sob in his throat. have done a sinful selfish thing," he said, drawing his hand across his brow; "that is all the dwelling I have to bring you to, Margaret, and you Aranmore's daughter." The girl saw that he was in a great distress, and that the sight of the poorness of the house had come to him like a new surprise, often as he had seen it, and she bent towards him very kindly, and began to smile and to say, "Where thou goest, I will go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge," and all the ancient beautiful words that Ruth said to Naomi on the way between Moab and Canaan in the old time. "Is this indeed

a

As might be supposed, there were divers opinions on Mr M'Coll's action on this occasion. Many of his opponents in the Church were wont to say that he had done a very wrong thing in going away with Aranmore's daughter in this fashion and marrying her against her father's will, and that no excuse could be found for the foolhardiness that made him cross the dangerous passage between Isle Aranmore and Rhu Rannoch in such a vessel. Even some of those who were his friends doubted whether he acted with propriety in so doing, and whether the thing was consistent with his notable character. Others again declared that the circumstances justified him, and that the favourable wind and weather showed there was а blessing on the enterprise.

There was that about Mr M'Coll which made it difficult to broach the subject with him, but there is reason to believe that he was never, even in his old age, doubtful of his action. He was known to say on one occasion to a friend that any

strength or firmness he was able to put forth afterwards in arranging the affairs of the Church in a difficult time were due, in his belief, to his having put fear from him at a much earlier period of his life, when he trusted himself and Margaret to the Providence of God upon the water.

Aranmore's attitude towards his son-in-law is well known. He set his face against him to such a degree that for three years he prevented his getting a settlement, and for these three years Margaret lived in a small thatched house in Rhu Rannoch, and Duncan was grieved to the heart because he could give her no better. He found that to defy M'Kenzie of Aranmore was not a light matter.

At the end of three years he received an invitation to preach in the island. He was amazed at it, but he went, and found matters there in a bad way. The congregation was still without a settled minister, and there was dissension and grumbling amongst the people. Aranmore was away in London, and the session had sent off for Mr M'Coll to preach to them, and now they were like to repent for fear of Mr M'Kenzie's anger. Duncan heard the whole story, and late on Saturday night who should come into the bay in a yacht but Aranmore himself; and on Sabbath, when Mr M'Coll went to the pulpit, there he sat facing him with his unmoved look and his gleaming eyes. Mr Duncan had not heard of his arrival, and for a moment

he was taken aback, and stood looking at him, and Aranmore returning the look. Then he recovered himself and went on with the service; but he changed his subject, and took for his text the words, "Who art thou, that thou shouldst be afraid of a man that shall die, and forgettest the Lord thy Maker?" It was a great sermon, but the people trembled for the plainness of it, since the application was not to be mistaken, and there was not a man in the church that had the courage to look at Aranmore. But when it was over, the Great Man went round to the vestry and held out his hand to Mr Duncan. "Well, Mr M'Coll," he said grimly, "I see you will make a minister." And in this way the two were reconciled.

Mr M'Coll lived to see great changes in the Church, and to make them as well as to see them, for he was a great warrior. His wife survived him by some years. She was a good woman, and her mind was much set on the world to come. She was beautiful even in old age; and although accounted proud, was very gracious and kind. She was very particular in her ways, and like a lady of old times, so that it was difficult to believe she had lived for three years in a thatched house in Rhu Rannoch. She was of a reserved nature, and spoke very rarely of her husband, but when she did so it was in a way not to be forgotten. She seemed to think there was no man in the world nowadays that was like Mr M'Coll.

L. M. M.

our

WE have no spring in the North-West. We jump over the dividing line between winter and June, and then jump back again hurriedly, as if afraid of own temerity, until the almanac tells us that summer has really arrived, and then we "make it so." I have seen a man in flannels and a straw hat sit down on a log to watch the ice-floes clashing and grinding down the river and piling themselves tumultuously over the piers; and I have been driven, as you shall presently hear, off a field of snow by mosquitoes. But F., who has spent most of his life soldiering in India, wouldn't believe all this, and that is why he started without a greatcoat, when he invited me to accompany him on an inspection trip in the month of May.

We sat on a platform at the rear of the car, all the way down to Selkirk on the Red River; and we smoked in the sun, fighting off the flies with our handkerchiefs, and trying to count the long black zigzags of wild geese who were hurrying north to their breeding-grounds in the Arctic circle. Next morning we were up early, and walked down to the wharf, with the smell of fresh-sawn lumber in our nostrils and the breeze off the prairie fanning our cheeks. The trees on the river - bank gleamed white and naked to about the height of a man's shoulder, where the bark had been scraped clean by the

driving ice last month, and the soil about their roots was carpeted with scentless violets; a mob of bare-legged Galician women in bright cottons were waiting for the ferry; and F. said that it reminded him of the tropics, and ate bananas and fanned himself with his hat to complete the illusion.

We drove about forty miles that day, skirting round the boggy places, for the melted snow and the rains had not yet permeated into the rich black soil, and there were pools of clear water here and there that would have been called lakes in an English park. We were hunting locations with the aid of a Survey map, that divides the whole province into onemile squares like a gigantic chess-board, each square being subdivided into thirty-six parts, so that a practised hand can find his way to any farm he wants, without sign-posts. The thermometer stood at 72° in the shade, and the mosquitoes sang around us in clouds during the afternoon, till we drove into a bush-fire, where wavelets of flame were licking up the short undergrowth all round, and crawling in and out between shallow pools of surfacewater, with swirling clouds of blue smoke that parched our throats and made our eyes smart. Therefore we determined that the morrow should see us on Lake Winnipeg, where a man can sail out of sight of land and hold converse

with the grey gulls from Hudson's Bay, and dream that he is at sea again.

There were twenty-four miles of river to be travelled before we could reach open water, and we only had one day wherein to make the entire trip; but we had an old friend in Selkirk who owned a small fleet of fishing and lumber steamers, and who had seen us through before now in case of need. He offered us the use of the Little Bobs, a brand-new steam-tug, which had made her first trip the previous day, and was now lying in "The Slough," a sort of lagoon half a mile from the town: a haven of dead ships during the winter, with wharves littered with scrap - iron and rusted chains, and a great coldstorage warehouse where fish can be kept through the hot months in a temperature reduced by the ammonia process to 25° or 30° below zero. Its walls were festooned with enormous necklaces of wooden net-floats, strung together like beads. There were new boats building near the spur-line of the railroad, and derelict skeletons falling to pieces on the muddy shore. But for a couple of Indians in a canoe among the reeds, we might have been in a backwater of the estuary of the Thames.

bottom of the harbour; and the whole blessed entanglement twisted round the blades and coiled tight about the shaft till the Little Bobs stopped dead, and used up most of her steam in hooting piteously for assist

ance.

We hacked off some of the mess with knives, and tore it away with our fingers, and started the engines again, to see "if she would chew it up herself," as the skipper expressed it, but finally gave up in despair and towed her ashore. Then we got a long chain and passed it bodily round her stern, and rigged up a tackle with triple blocks and enlisted all the halfbreeds in sight to haul on it till we had lifted the whole propeller clear out of the water, and then we sent for a blacksmith and a cold chisel. It was half-past eleven before we were under way again and steaming at full speed-about six miles an hour-down the dull green waters of the Red River. The Indians were holding their annual dog-feast on the Reserve, and the drumming of tom-toms and "ki-yi-yings " of the braves were raising a diabolical row on the eastern bank. Small brown-skinned papooses were throwing gleaming fish ashore from their flat-bottomed boats, and the huge Government dredge towered up like a threestoried house, lumbering along in the wake of an absurd little tug, not much bigger than the Little Bobs herself. There were wild-duck overhead and in the water; and as we drew near to the head of the delta the wind began to blow in cool