way, but I hardly fancied him as a rooming
partner and a possible bedfellow. To be candid, I never had had a
bedfellow in all my life and I had already made up my mind that, rather
than suffer one now, I would fix up one of the several empty barns
which were scattered here and there over the property, and thus retain
my beloved privacy.

My employer pushed his way into the house and invited me to follow him.

I found myself in a small, front room, neatly but plainly furnished.
The floor was varnished and two bearskin rugs supplied the only
carpeting. It had a mahogany centre table, on which a large
oil-burning reading lamp was set. Three wicker chairs, designed solely
for comfort, and a stove with an open front helped to complete its
comfortable appearance. A number of framed photographs of Golden
Crescent and some water colour paintings decorated the plain, wooden
walls. In the far corner, beside a small side window, there stood a
writing desk; while, all along that side of the wall, on a long curtain
pole, there was hung, from brass rings, a heavy green curtain.

I took in what I could in a cursory glance and I marvelled that there
could be so much apparent concentrated comfort so far away from city
civilisation; but, when my guide pulled aside the curtain on the wall
and disclosed rows and rows of books behind a glass front, books
ancient and modern, books of religion, philosophy, medicine, history,
fiction and poetry,--at least a thousand of them,--I gave up trying any
more to fathom what manner of a man he was.

My eyes sparkled and explained to K. B. Horsfal what my voice failed to
utter.

"Well,--what d'ye think of it all?" he asked at last.

"It is a delight,--a positive delight," I replied simply.

As I walked over to the front window, I wondered little that Mrs.
Horsfal should have loved the place; and, when I looked away out over
the dancing waters, upon the beauties of the bay in the changing light
of the lowering sun, upon the rocky, fir-dotted island a mile to sea,
and upon the lonely-looking homes of the settlers over there two miles
away on the far horn of Golden Crescent, with the great background of
mountains in purple velvet,--I wondered less.

"Yes! George,--it's pretty near what heaven should be to look at. But
I guess it's the same old story that the poet once sang:

"'Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.'

"That poet kind of forgot that, if what he said was true, it