h
obvious dignity of appearance and manner was entirely lacking to him.

The toothless, childish old man woman Trenholme encountered when he
entered the house struck him as an odd exaggeration of the report he had
just received. He did not feel at home when he sat down to eat the food
Bates set before him; he perceived that it was chiefly because in a new
country hospitality is considered indispensable to an easy conscience
that he had received any show of welcome.

Yet the lank brown hand that set his mug beside him shook so that some
tea was spilt. Bates was in as dire need of the man he received so
unwillingly as ever man was in need of his fellow-man. It is when the
fetter of solitude has begun to eat into a man's flesh that he begins to
proclaim his indifference to it, and the human mind is never in such
need of companionship as when it shuns companions.

The two spent most of the evening endeavouring to restore to liveliness
the birds that Trenholme had taken from his pockets, and in discussing
them. Bates produced a very old copy of a Halifax newspaper which
contained a sonnet to this bird, in which the local poet addressed it as

"The Sunset-tinted grosbeak of the north"

Trenholme marvelled at his resources. Such newspapers as he stored up
were kept under the cushion of the old aunt's armchair.

Bates brought out some frozen cranberries for the birds. They made a
rough coop and settled them in it outside, in lee of one of the sheds.
It is extraordinary how much time and trouble people will expend on such
small matters if they just take it into their heads to do it.

CHAPTER IV.

There was no very valuable timber on Bates's land. The romance of the
lumber trade had already passed from this part of the country, but the
farmers still spent their winters in getting out spruce logs, which were
sold at the nearest saw-mills. Bates and Cameron had possessed
themselves of a large portion of the hill on which they had settled,
with a view to making money by the trees in this way--money that was
necessary to the household, frugal as it was, for, so far, all their
gains had been spent in necessary improvements. Theirs had been a
far-seeing policy that would in the end have brought prosperity, had the
years of uninterrupted toil on which they calculated been realised.

It was not until the next day that Trenholme fully understood how
helpless the poor Scotchman really was in his present circumstances. I