orth from the St. Lawrence runs the road through the Indian
Lands. At first its way lies through open country, from which the forest
has been driven far back to the horizon on either side, for along the
great river these many years villages have clustered, with open fields
about them stretching far away. But when once the road leaves the
Front, with its towns and villages and open fields, and passes beyond
Martintown and over the North Branch, it reaches a country where the
forest is more a feature of the landscape. And when some dozen or more
of the crossroads marking the concessions which lead off to east and
west have been passed, the road seems to strike into a different world.
The forest loses its conquered appearance, and dominates everything.
There is forest everywhere. It lines up close and thick along the road,
and here and there quite overshadows it. It crowds in upon the little
farms and shuts them off from one another and from the world outside,
and peers in through the little windows of the log houses looking
so small and lonely, but so beautiful in their forest frames. At the
nineteenth cross-road the forest gives ground a little, for here the
road runs right past the new brick church, which is almost finished, and
which will be opened in a few weeks. Beyond the cross, the road leads
along the glebe, and about a quarter of a mile beyond the corner there
opens upon it the big, heavy gate that the members of the Rev. Alexander
Murray's congregation must swing when they wish to visit the manse. The
opening of this gate, made of upright poles held by auger-holes in a
frame of bigger poles, was almost too great a task for the minister's
seven-year-old son Hughie, who always rode down, standing on the hind
axle of the buggy, to open it for his father. It was a great relief
to him when Long John Cameron, who had the knack of doing things for
people's comfort, brought his ax and big auger one day and made a kind
of cradle on the projecting end of the top bar, which he then weighted
with heavy stones, so that the gate, when once the pin was pulled out
of the post, would swing back itself with Hughie straddled on the top of
it.

It was his favorite post of observation when waiting for his mother to
come home from one of her many meetings. And on this particular March
evening he had been waiting long and impatiently.

Suddenly he shouted: "Horo, mamma! Horo!" He had caught sight of the
little black pony away up at t