led garden and the half-cultivated
fields.

Five years before, a certain Captain Underwood, flying from financial
disaster in England, had come to Canada with his wife and his two
children, Dick and Stephanie. There was roving blood in the
Underwoods, so perhaps it was not surprising that the unfortunate
captain should have ranged farther afield in Ontario than others had
then done; for he left the settlements and the surveyed townships
behind him, and struck farther north, wishing to get as far away as
possible from the world that had brought him ruin. In the friendly
forests, a little beyond the region where the white settlers had
penetrated, but not entirely out of touch with them, he found a natural
clearing, and here he had built his tiny cabin and roughly marked out
his small fields. Here, perhaps, the poor man, knowing nothing of the
country, had thought to live a sort of idyllic hermit existence. But
he found it very different. It was a terrible life to which he had
brought his wife and children; and when Mrs. Underwood died, three
years after leaving England, he blamed himself for her death. Most of
his heart he buried with her in that lonely grave under the mighty
maples on the hill; and afterwards he turned to the wild life around
him as to his only help and comfort.

But he had no longer the courage to fight the farmer's fight, the
primitive conflict between man's skill and nature's strength. Soon the
garden that his wife had loved became overgrown with native flowers and
weeds. Soon the bushes and the grass crept inwards over his fields.
Soon his son and daughter shot up from childhood to youth, perfectly
healthy in their hard life. Stephanie was fifteen years old, and being
as strong as a young lynx, she did all the work of the log-cabin. She
made a rough sort of corn cake which served for bread, she prepared the
endless pea-soup and pork, she washed and mended and even made the
clothes. Dick helped his father, or idled away on little hunting
expeditions of his own, from which he returned happy and rarely
empty-handed.

It was a strange life for a boy and girl, carefully and lovingly
brought up amid English comforts and ease, to lead. Their nearest
neighbours, the Collinsons, with whom Captain Underwood did most of his
little trading, were twenty miles distant. Kindly Mrs. Collinson had
offered Stephanie a home when Mrs. Underwood died, but the girl had
chosen to stay with her father and D