looked up with eyes of dumb devotion as the man seated himself.
He wagged his tail expectantly, but, seeing the open Bible, dropped his
nose between his paws again and dozed.

But Duncan Polite did not read. His eyes wandered away over the
landscape. It was a scene worth contemplating--an expansive tract of
rich farm lands, stretching from the blue line of Lake Simcoe on the
south, to another blue line on the northern horizon, where Lake Oro
peeped through the sharp tops of the firs. But to Duncan Polite, the
best of all was the little valley that sloped abruptly from his very
doorstep to the sparkling river.

His eyes followed the white road that passed his farm and wound down
into the shady depths. He could see it twisting in and out among the
elms, and on through the village where the tall smoke-stack of the
saw-mill, the church spire and the chimneys of the houses rose out of
the green orchards. It crossed the blue line of the river where the
old church stood, and then went winding up the opposite hill to
disappear among the pines.

The beauty of it all went to Duncan Polite's poetic heart. The music
of the river, mingling with the chorus of the orioles that flashed
golden in the pines at his gate, found an echo in his soul, and he
crooned to its accompaniment his favourite Gaelic psalm,

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters."

_His_ glen, Duncan Polite had always called this place beneath him,
though he owned not a foot of land within its green walls; but his glen
it really was in a higher sense. More than fifty years before, old
Donald McDonald, his father, had cut down the first tree on the Oro
banks, and there, in that time of incredible hardships, he had knelt
one day by an old mossy stone on the edge of the valley and,
Jacob-like, made a covenant with the Lord, that if He would be with him
and give him a home for his children in the wilderness, they would
pledge themselves to make it a place of righteousness, as pure and
lovely as they had received it from Nature's hand.

Duncan had been a mere child then, but he had realised something of the
solemnity of the pledge. As he grew older the feeling became stronger,
until it developed into the conviction that he had been chosen for this
special work, namely, that of keeping the little glen at his feet a
centre of all good influences. He had set himself as a sort of
spiritual watchman to the place;