f indeed she did not openly speak of him, as that "splendid
Donald Mackintosh," or "the handsome 'Heather Bell' captain."

But nothing could have made Donald believe this, which was in one way a
pity, though in another way not. If he had known how women admired him,
he would have inevitably been more or less spoiled by it, wasted his
time, and not have been so good a sailor. On the other hand, it was a
pity to see him,--forty years old, and alone in the world,--not a chick
nor a child of his own, nor any home except such miserable makeshifts as
a sailor finds in inns or boarding-houses.

It was a wonder that the warm-hearted fellow had kept a cheery nature
and face all these years living thus. But the "Heather Bell" stood to
him in place of wife, children, home. There is no passion in life so
like the passion of a man for a woman as the passion of a sailor for his
craft; and this passion Donald had to the full. It was odd how he came
to be a born sailor. His father and his father's fathers, as far back as
they knew, had been farmers--three generations of them--on the Prince
Edward Island farm where Donald was born; and still more generations of
them in old Scotland. Pure Scotch on both sides of the house for
hundreds of years were the Mackintoshes, and the Gaelic tongue was
to-day freer spoken in their houses than English.

The Mackintosh farm on Prince Edward Island was in the parish of Orwell
Head, and Donald's earliest transgressions and earliest pleasures were
runaway excursions to the wharves of that sleepy shore. To him Spruce
Wharf was a centre of glorious maritime adventure. The small sloops that
plied up and down the coast of the island, running in at the inlets, and
stopping to gather up the farmers' produce and take it to Charlottetown
markets, seemed to him as grand as Indiamen; and when, in his twelfth
year, he found himself launched in life as a boy-of-all-work on one of
these sloops, whose captain was a friend of his father's, he felt that
his fortune was made. And so it was. He was in the line of promotion by
virtue of his own enthusiasm. No plank too small for the born sailor to
swim by. Before Donald was twenty-five he himself commanded one of these
little coasting-vessels. From this he took a great stride forward, and
became first officer on the iron-clad steamer plying between
Charlottetown and the mainland. The winter service on this boat was
terrible,--ploughing and cutting through nearly solid ic