Project Gutenberg's David Fleming's Forgiveness, by Margaret Murray Robertson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: David Fleming's Forgiveness

Author: Margaret Murray Robertson

Illustrator: Geo. H. Edwards

Release Date: January 29, 2009 [EBook #27930]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAVID FLEMING'S FORGIVENESS ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

David Fleming's Forgiveness, by Margaret Murray Robertson.

CHAPTER ONE.

A CANADIAN SETTLEMENT.

The first tree felled in the wilderness that lay to the south and west
of the range of hills of which Hawk's Head is the highest, was felled by
the two brothers Holt. These men left the thickly-settled New England
valley where they were born, passed many a thriving town and village,
and crossed over miles and miles of mountain and forest to seek a home
in a strange country. Not that they thought of it as a strange country,
for it was a long time ago, and little was known by them of limits or
boundary lines, when they took possession of the fertile Canadian valley
which had till then been the resort only of trappers and Indians. They
were only squatters, that is, they cut down the great trees, and built
log-houses, and set about making farms in the wilderness, with no better
right to the soil than that which their labour gave. They needed no
better right, they thought; at least, there was no one to interfere with
them, and soon a thriving settlement was made in the valley. It turned
out well for the Holts and for those who followed them, for after a good
many years their titles to their farms were secured to them on easy
terms by the Canadian Government, but they had held them as their own
from the first.

Within ten years of the coming of the brothers, the cluster of dwellings
rising around the saw-mill which Gershom Holt had built on the Beaver
River--the store, the school-house, the blacksmith's shop--began to be
spoken of by the farmers as "the village." Every year of the ten that
followed was marked by tokens of the slow but sure prosperity which,
when the settlers have been men of moral lives and industrious habits,
has uniformly attended the pl