n the cause of bitter disputing between Archie
and Sandy,--Sandy insisting upon having it in; Archie insisting that it
was absurd, because they would not go to school as long as Miss McDonald
lived. "But there's the little ones and the babies that'll be growin'
up," retorted Sandy, "an' there'll never be another like her: I say, 'as
long as she lives'"; and "as long as she lives" it was. And when Archie,
with an unnecessary emphasis, delivered this closing clause of the
petition, it was received with a roar of laughter from the platform,
which made him flush angrily, and say, with a vicious punch in Sandy's
ribs: "There, I told ye, it spoiled it a'. They're fit to die over it;
an' sma' blame to 'em, ye silly!"

But he was reassured when he heard Sandy Bruce's voice overtopping the
tumult with: "A vary sensible request, my lad; an' I, for one, am o' yer
way o' thinkin'."

In which speech was a deeper significance than anybody at the time
dreamed. In that hurly-burly and hilarious confusion no one had time to
weigh words or note meanings; but there were some who recalled it a few
months later when they were bidden to a wedding at the house of John
McDonald,--a wedding at which Sandy Bruce was groom, and Little Bel the
brightest, most winsome of brides.

It was an odd way that Sandy went to work to win her: his ways had been
odd all his life,--so odd that it had long ago been accepted in the
minds of the Charlottetown people that he would never find a woman to
wed him; only now and then an unusually perspicacious person divined
that the reason of his bachelorhood was not at all that women did not
wish to wed him, spite of his odd ways, but that he himself found no
woman exactly to his taste.

True it was that Sandy Bruce, aged forty, had never yet desired any
woman for his wife till he looked into the face of Little Bel in the
Wissan Bridge school-house. And equally true was it that before the last
strains of "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled" had died away on that
memorable afternoon of her exhibition of her school, he had determined
that his wife she should be.

This was the way he took to win her. No one can deny that it was odd.

There was some talk between him and his temporary colleague on the
School Board, old Dalgetty, as they drove home together behind the brisk
Norwegian ponies; and the result of this conversation was that the next
morning early--in fact, before Little Bel was dressed, so late had she
been i