than
hostility, they christened their cove "Bumble-Bee Bight," and the home
which they partly built before the winter drove them south again, "the
Hive"; while for purposes of his own Ned left the island unnamed.

The trip proved a bumper one. They carried a full fare home; and big
were the rumours which got around of the fisherman's paradise which
Ned Waring had discovered. When the voyage was turned in, Ned was able
to purchase every essential and many comforts for the new home in the
North, and yet have a balance coming to him large enough to furnish
him with the bravest winter outfit a young suitor could wish.

Uncle Johnnie was, however, all the time "one too many" for him as
well as all the rest; and never was he able to catch Marie alone.
Things went on uneventfully through Christmas and the New Year. The
old man no longer drove dogs. He spent almost all his time pottering
around his own house, now and again cleaving a few billets of wood;
but to all intents and purposes he was hibernating like one of our
Labrador bears.

When March month once more came around, the magic word "swiles" was
whispered from mouth to mouth, and Uncle Johnnie woke up like a weasel
when a rabbit is about. Every day he sallied up to his lookout on the
hill, telescope in hand, at stated hours. But the hours were so timed
that Marie could always go with him.

"Swiles" are second nature to most Labrador men. As for Uncle Johnnie,
he would leave his Christmas dinner any time if any one came and
called, "Swiles!" He would rather haul a two-dollar pelt over "t'
ballicaters" than make two hundred in any other way.

"So I reckoned," said Ned cannily, "one chance to make t' old man
friendly was to put him in t' way o' doing again what he was really
scarcely able to do any longer; and that was, to have as many notches
on his gaff-stick for dead seals as any other man.

"It were, however, longer than I cares to remember now, before much of
a chance come my way, but it come at last. T' spring had been that
hard and that quiet that I 'lows us could have walked over to t' Gaspe
shore if us had been so minded. T' standing ice never broke up from
Christmas to April month; and there'd been ne'er a bit of whelping ice
near enough to see with a spyglass, or a swatch big enough for an old
harp to put his whiskers through. So when us woke one morning and
found that t' sea had heaved in overnight unbeknownst to us, and that
there was lakes of blue wat