nationalities that
were being welded together to make the Canadian race were by no means
one, and he had inherited all the prejudices of his own people. Number
Nine was a school eminently calculated to keep alive all the small race
animosities that characterised the times; for English, Irish and
Scotch, both Highland and Lowland, had settled in small communities
with the schoolhouse as a central point.

The building was situated in a hollow made by a bend in the Oro River;
to the north among the green hills surrounding Lake Oro, was the Oa, a
district named after a part of Islay, and there dwelt the Highlanders;
all MacDonalds, all related, all tenaciously clannish, and all such
famous warriors that they had earned the name throughout the whole
County of Simcoe of the "Fighting MacDonalds," a name which their
progeny who attended Number Nine School strove valiantly to perpetuate.

From the low-lying lands at the south, a region called the Flats, which
sloped gently southward until it sank beneath the blue waters of Lake
Simcoe, came the Irish contingent, always merry, always quarrelling,
and always headed by young Pat Murphy and Nancy Caldwell, who were the
chief warriors of the section.

And over on the western plains that stretched away from the banks of
the Oro, on a concession locally styled "the Tenth," lived a class of
pupils whose chief representative had been overheard by a Highland
enemy to say, as he named the forest trees along his path to school,
"That there's a _hoak_, an' that there's a _hash_, an' that there's a
_helm_." Though the youth bore the highly respectable and historic
name of Tommy Tucker, he was forever after branded as "Hoak" Tucker,
and his two innocent brothers were dubbed, respectively, "Helm" and
"Hash."

One more nationality was represented in Number Nine, those who
approached the school-house with the rising sun behind them. They were
Scotch to a man; what was more, they proclaimed the fact upon the
fence-tops and made themselves obnoxious to even the MacDonalds, for
after all they were only Lowlanders, and how could the Celt be expected
to treat them as equals?

When this heterogeneous assembly had all passed under the rod and
seated themselves, the master tramped up to his desk and a solemn hush
fell over the room. This was remarkable, for unless McAllister was in
an unusually bad humour Number Nine buzzed like a saw-mill. But this
morning the silence was intense and ominous