s adjured, the Weaver told his
story. When he had finished, it appeared that a much graver danger
than a Fenian raid threatened the Glen, for what should Tom Caldwell
and all those Irish louts from the Flats be up to now but an
Orangemen's raid!

Big Malcolm removed his pipe and glared at the speaker.

"What is it ye will be saying, man?" he demanded harshly. Weaver
Jimmie looked encouraged, and avoiding Callum's eye, he gave further
details. Tom Caldwell had lately been the means of organising an
Orange lodge in the Flats, and at their last meeting the brethren had
decreed that, upon the coming 12th of July, they must have a
celebration. It was to be no ordinary affair either, Pete Nash himself
told him; but such a magnificent spectacle as the pioneers had never
yet witnessed. Pete had received orders to prepare dinner for fifty
guests and whiskey for twice as many. There was to be a grand rally
early in the morning at the home of Tom Caldwell, who was to personate
the great Protestant monarch, and at high noon a triumphal march up
over the hills and down into the Glen to the feast,--with fifes and
drums and a greater display in crossing the Oro than King William
himself had had in crossing the historic Boyne.

Big Malcolm sat silent, his fists clenched. He was a Glencoe
MacDonald, and, like all his clan, had an abhorrence of the name of
Orange running fiercely in his veins. But he was saying to himself
over and over that he who had repented of all his strife, who had set
his face firmly against the evils of the day and become a leader of the
new movement that was bringing the community into a higher and better
life, he certainly must not be the one to stir up dissension. And yet,
to have a celebration in their own glen in honour of the MacDonalds'
betrayer!

"It will be a low, scandalous, Irish trick!" he vehemently burst forth.

Weaver Jimmie's eyes brightened. "They would be needing to learn a
lesson, whatever," he suggested tentatively.

"Malcolm," Mrs. MacDonald's voice came in gently, "we will surely not
be forgetting that Tom Caldwell would be joining us at the meetings
these last winters, and indeed we would jist all be praying together
that the Father would be putting away all strife from our hearts."

Callum cast his mother a look of gratitude; for, though generally the
first to scent the battle from afar and hasten its approach, for very
good reasons of his own he was on this occasion stron