m pass, but the man paused.

"I forgot to ask you your own name, among all the others," he said,
more for the sake of engaging the youth in conversation than to gain
information. "You are a MacDonald, too, I believe?"

Scotty had long passed the time when he felt his English name a
disgrace. Of course he would have preferred one of another sort, but
he scarcely thought of it now, and most of his schoolmates had
forgotten that he possessed one. And, in the face of this grave man's
courtesy, he felt it would be childish to pretend, so he answered, not
without some dignity, "No, my name will not be MacDonald, it will be
Stanwell, Ralph Stanwell."

The new master's grey eyes grew suddenly narrow; he was well acquainted
with all the small tricks to be played upon a newcomer, and had many a
time seen this one of a fictitious name successfully practiced. He had
been prepared to find this boy hard to manage, but he was disgusted
that he should descend to such a small, childish prank. He knew
Scotty's name only too well, and, in any case, for a youth with a
marked Highland accent, dressed in the grey homespun which seemed the
uniform of the clan MacDonald, to stand before him and give himself
such a name as this was as stupid as it was insulting.

"That is a very clumsy lie," he remarked quietly.

Scotty dropped his snowball and stared; for a moment he did not quite
comprehend.

"What?" he cried artlessly. His look of innocent amazement doubled his
listener's indignation.

"I said," returned the man very distinctly, "that you have told me a
lie, and a very stupid one, for I know your name to be Scot MacDonald,
and a rather notorious one you have made it, too."

And turning his back in disgust, the new master walked quietly down the
snowy road. For an instant Scotty stood glaring after him, every drop
of his rebellious blood tingling. He snatched up his snowball again
and took aim. If he could only smash that conceited looking hat, or
better still, the insufferable white collar! But there was something
in the commanding air of the figure that went so steadily onward, not
deigning to look back, that held the boy's arm.

Instead, he sent the missile crashing into the last remaining pane in
the porch window, and went leaping into the school, determined to find
Dan and relieve his feelings by working some irreparable damage.

The schoolhouse was in a condition to invite depredations. Late in the
previous autumn