the best interests
of the country to secure the attention of his listener. In this land,
where no church is established, there is so little bitterness existing
between different religious bodies, that the fact that the college was
under Episcopal management made no difference to the Presbyterian's
goodwill towards it. He sent his own boys to school there, admired
Trenholme's enthusiastic devotion to his work, and believed as firmly as
the Principal himself that the school would become a great university.
It was important to Trenholme that this man--that any man of influence,
should believe in him, in his college, and in the great future of both.
The prosperity of his work depended so greatly upon the good opinion of
all, that he had grown into the habit of considering hours well spent
that, like this one, were given to bringing another into sympathy with
himself in the matter of the next projected improvement. It was thus
that he had advanced his work step by step since he came to Chellaston;
if the method sometimes struck his inner self as a little sordid, the
work was still a noble one, and the method necessary to the quick
enlargement he desired. Both men were in full tide of talk upon the
necessity for a new gymnasium, its probable cost, and the best means of
raising the money, when they walked out of the pine shade into an open
stretch of the road.

Soft, mountainous clouds of snowy whiteness were winging their way
across the brilliant blue of the sky. The brightness of the light had
wiped all warm colour from the landscape. The airy shadows of the clouds
coursed over a scene in which the yellow of ripened fields, the green of
the woods on Chellaston Mountain, and the blue of the distance, were
only brought to the eye in the pale, cool tones of high light. The road
and the river ran together now as far as might be seen, the one almost
pure white in its inch-deep dust, the other tumbling rapidly, a dancing
mirror for the light.

The talkers went on, unmindful of dust and heat. Then a cloud came
between them and the sun, changing the hue of all things for the moment.
This lured them further. The oat harvest was ready. The reaping machines
were already in the fields far and near, making noise like that of some
new enormous insect of rattling throat. From roadside trees the cicada
vied with them, making the welkin ring.

There were labourers at various occupations in the fields, but on the
dusty stretch of road ther