of the outside
respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont
to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had
hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the
second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that
his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things,
sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only
present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience,
though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which
that letter, if letter it was, might contain--news concerning
Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short
by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the
Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to
become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a
trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was
striking a match to light his pipe.

Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover
something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.

A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down
an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of
it on the inside, wound it up with a key which was in the back, and
set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though
a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself
from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and
whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come
from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious
perversion of the vowels,

"Sife in the h'arms of Jesus,
Sife on 'is gentle breast,
There by 'is love o'ershadowed
Sweetly my soul shall rest."

He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more
of that--the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself
and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something
hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in
Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the
mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had
heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he
believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no
overshadowing God--only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.

But