loured with the melody of hope. Even hoary jokes and ancestral
stories, kept for tea-meetings as hard tack is kept for the army and
navy, were disinfected by the kindly flavour which brooded like an April
cloud.

And now it is my purpose to set down as best I may some of the features
of my life, and a few of my most vivid observations among these
remarkable folk.

The greater number of them had been born in bonnie Scotland, and all of
them, even those who had never seen their ancestral home, spoke and
lived and thought as though they had just come from the heathery hills.
They were sprung from the loins of heroes, the stalwart pioneers from
Roxburghshire and Ayrshire and Dumfries, and many another noble spot
whose noblest sons had gone forth to earth's remotest bound, flaming
with love of liberty and God. Seventy years before they had settled
about New Jedboro, thinking of the well-loved Scottish town whose name
it bore.

Soon the echoing forest bowed before their gleaming axes, and they made
the wilderness to blossom like the rose. Comfort, and even wealth, came
to them at the imperious beck of industry. Stern and earnest, reckoning
frivolity a sin, finding their pleasure in a growing capacity for
self-denial and a growing scorn of needless luxury, they cherished in
their blood the iron which had been bequeathed by noble sires.

Hand in hand with God like sons of Knox, they built the school and the
church with the first-fruits of their toil, disporting themselves again
in their unforgotten psalms, worshipping after the dear-bought manner of
their fathers, not a few of whom had paid the price of blood, nor deemed
it sacrifice.

Like draws to like, they say. With St. Cuthbert's this had certainly
been the case; for every minister who had served them heretofore had
been both born and educated in their motherland.

Three had they had. The first was the Reverend John Grant, Doctor of
Divinity, from Greenock; the second, the Reverend James Kay, from
Aberdeen; the third, my immediate predecessor, the Reverend Henry
Alexander from Glasgow.

Like a mountain peak towered the memory of their first minister, a man
of gigantic power, scholarly and profound, grimly genial, carrying with
him everywhere the air of the Eternal. He was as eloquent almost as
human lips can be, magnetic to the point of tyranny, and grandly
independent of everything and every one but God. His fame covered Canada
like a flood. American colleges sou