through the psalm for
the second time, when the stamping of snowy feet at the door announced
the return of Big Malcolm and his sons. Callum came swinging in first,
Callum who was such a gay, handsome, rollicking fellow that he was
Scotty's hero and copy. The boy sprang up, pitching himself upon him,
and was promptly swung over the young man's shoulders, until his feet
kicked the raftered ceiling. Scotty yelled with glee, Bruce leaped up
barking, and the room was in an uproar.

"Hooch! be quate!" shouted Big Malcolm. "It is a child you are
yourself, Callum!"'

At the sounds of the noise and laughter a small figure stirred in the
shadowy chimney-corner, the figure of a little, bent, old man, with a
queer, elfish, hairy visage. He sat up and his small, red eyes blinked
wonderingly. "Hech, hech, and it will be the cold night, Malcolm!" he
said in Gaelic.

"A cold night it is, Farquhar," cried Big Malcolm, piling the wood upon
the fire. "But we will soon be fixing that, whatever."

"It will be a good thing to be by a warm fire this night," continued
Old Farquhar solemnly, "och, hone, a good thing, indeed!"

Outside the wind had once more gathered its forces, and was howling
about the house, and the swaying branches of the silver maple were
tapping upon the roof as though to remind the inhabitants that it was
still there to protect them. But the little old man shivered at the
sound, for he had once known what it was to be homeless on those hills
over which the blast was sweeping.

How Old Farquhar came to be a member of Big Malcolm MacDonald's family
no one could quite tell. He was one of those unattached fragments of
humanity often found in a new country. A sort of wandering minstrel
was Farquhar, content so long as he could pay for a meal or a night's
lodging at a wayside tavern by a song, or a tune on his fiddle. Thus
he had drifted musically for years through the Canadian backwoods,
until homeless old age had overtaken him. Four years before he had
spent a summer at Big Malcolm's, helping perfunctorily in the harvest
fields, working little and singing much, and when the first hard frost
had set the forest aflame he had gathered his poor, scant bundle of
clothes into his carpet-bag preparatory to taking the road again.

"And where will you be going for the winter?" Big Malcolm had asked.

"She'll not know," said Old Farquhar, glancing tremulously over the
great stretches of dying forest, "she'll not kn