hat _he had the amethyst_. Could he not see it
almost any evening toward sundown by merely climbing the hillside back
of his snug homestead? How divinely it gleamed, with long, pale, steady
rays, just inside the lines of circumvallation which he had so cunningly
drawn about it! In its low lurking-place beside the hubbub of the
recurring ebb and flow, it seemed to watch, like an unwinking eye, for
the coming of curious and baleful fates.

But it never fell to the Scotchman's fortune to behold his treasure
close at hand. To the hill-top he had to go whenever he would gloat upon
its beauty. To the most diligent and tireless searching of every inch of
the marsh's surface it refused to yield up its implacably virginal
lustre. Sometimes, though rarely, it was visible as the moon drew near
her setting, and then it would glitter whitely and malignantly, like a
frosty spear-point.

At last the settlers began to whisper that the Star was not in the marsh
at all, but that Dugald McIntyre, after the fashion of these canny folk,
had o'er-reached himself, and run the lines of the dike right over it.
That it could continue to shine under such discouraging circumstances,
the settlement by this time scorned to doubt. To "The Eye of Gluskap"
the people were ready to attribute any powers, divine or devilish.

Whether the degree of possession to which Dugald McIntyre had attained
could be considered to constitute a legal ownership of the jewel or not
is a question for lawyers, not for the mere teller of a plain tale, the
mere digger among the facts of a perishing history. Suffice it to say
that the finger of ill-fortune soon designated Dugald McIntyre as the
man whose claim to the "Eye" was acknowledged by the Fates.

From the time of the completion of the new dike dated the Scotchman's
troubles. His cattle one year, his crops another, seemed to find the
seasons set against them. Dugald's prudence, watchfulness, and untiring
industry minimized every stroke; nevertheless, things went steadily to
the worse.

It was Destiny _versus_ Dugald McIntyre, and with true Scottish
determination Dugald braced himself to the contest. He made a brave
fight; but wherever there was a doubtful point at issue, the Court
Invisible ruled inexorably and without a scruple against the possessor
of the "Eye of Gluskap." When he was harvesting his first crop of hay
off the new dike--and a fine crop it seemed likely to be--the rains set
in with a persistence th