sholm, when it was low-water at the spring-tides. But most
of all he loved the mills, where he saw huge logs lifted out of the
water, slid along the runners, and made to fall apart in clean-cut
fragrant planks in a few seconds of time.

"That tree took some hundreds of years to grow, but the buzz-saw turns
her into plain deal-boards before you can wink. All flesh is grass,"
soliloquised the logger preacher.

A winter in a lumber camp is a time when a man can put in loads of
thinking. Dried fish and boiled tea do not atrophy a man's brain.
Loggers do not say much except on Sundays, when they wash their shirts.
Even then it was Sylvanus who did most of the talking.

Sometimes during the week a comrade would trudge alongside of him as he
went out in the uncomfortable morning.

"That was the frozen truth you gave us on Sunday, I guess!" said one who
answered placably to the name of Bob Ridley--or, indeed, to any other
name if he thought it was meant for him. "I've swore off, parson, and I
wrote that afternoon to my old mother."

Such were the preacher's triumphs.

Thus Sylvanus Cobb learned his lesson in the College of the Silences, to
the accompaniment of the hard clang of the logs roaring down the
mountain-side, or the sweeter and more continuous ring of his men's
axes. At night he walked about a long time, silent under the
thick-spangled roofing of stars. For in that land the black midnight sky
is not thin-sprinkled with glistening pointlets as at home, but wears a
very cloth of gold. The frost shrewdly nipped his ears, and he heard the
musical sound of the water running somewhere under the ice. A poor hare
ran to his feet, pursued by a fox which drew off at sight of him,
showing an ugly flash of white teeth.

But all the while, among his quietness of thought, and even in the hours
when he went indoors to read to the men as they sat on their rugs with
their feet to the fire, he thought oftenest of the walks on the North
Berwick sands, and of the important fact that May Chisholm had to stop
three times to push a rebellious wisp of ringlets under her hat-brim.
Strange are the workings of the heart of a man, and there is generally a
woman somewhere who pulls the strings.

Euroclydon laid his axe-handle on the leaves of his Hebrew Bible to keep
them from turning in the brisk airs which the late Canadian spring
brought into the long log-hut, loosening the moss in its crevices. The
scent of seaweed on a far-away beach