uld vie with anything in the large border towns. Like
most Indians, he was recklessly extravagant, and many a time the
thrifty Scotch blood of the missionary would urge more economy,
less expenditure. But the building went on; George determined it
was to be a "Grand Mansion." His very title demanded that he give
his wife an abode worthy of the ancestors who appropriated the name
as their own.

"When you both go from me, even if it is only across the fields to
the new home, I shall be very much alone," Mr. Evans had once said.
Then in an agony of fear that his solitary life would shadow their
happiness, he added quickly, "But I have a very sweet and lovely
niece who writes me she will come to look after this desolated home
if I wish it, and perhaps her brother will come, too, if I want
him. I am afraid I _shall_ want him sorely, George. For though you
will be but five minutes walk from me, your face will not be at my
breakfast table to help me begin each day with a courage it has
always inspired. So I beg that you two will not delay your
marriage; give no thought to me. You are young but once, and youth
has wings of wonderful swiftness. Margaret and Christopher shall
come to me; but although they are my own flesh and blood, they will
never become to me what you two have been, and always will be."

Within their recollection, the lovers had never heard the
missionary make so long a speech. They felt the earnestness of it,
the truth of it, and arranged to be married when the golden days of
August came. Lydia was to go to her married sister, in the eastern
part of Canada, whose husband was a clergyman, and at whose home
she had spent many of her girlhood years. George was to follow. They
were to be quietly married and return by sailing vessel up the
lakes, then take the stage from what is now the city of Toronto,
arrive at the Indian Reserve, and go direct to the handsome home
the young chief had erected for his English bride. So Lydia Bestman
set forth on her long journey from which she was to return as the
wife of the head chief of a powerful tribe of Indians--a man
revered, respected, looked up to by a vast nation, a man of
sterling worth, of considerable wealth as riches were counted in
those days, a man polished in the usages and etiquette of her own
people, who conducted himself with faultless grace, who would have
shone brilliantly in any drawing-room (and who in after years was
the guest of honor at many a great r