forts.

I pulled my legs back into the bed in order to start the day correctly.
I lay and stretched myself, then, very leisurely,--always remembering
that it was the Sabbath,--I put one foot out and then the other, until,
at last, I stood on the floor, really and truly up and awake.

Jake had been around. I could see traces of him in the yard, though he
was nowhere visible in the flesh.

After I had breakfasted and made my bed (I know little Maisie Brant,
who used to make my bed away back over in the old home--little Maisie
who had wept at my departure, would have laughed till she wept again,
had she seen my woful endeavours to straighten out my sheets and smooth
my pillow. But then, she was not there to see and laugh and--I was
quite satisfied with my handiwork and satisfied that I would be able to
sleep soundly in the bed when the night should come again)--I hunted
the shelves for a book.

Stevenson, Poe, Scott, Hugo, Wells, Barrie, Dumas, Twain, Emerson,
Byron, Longfellow, Burns,--which should it be?

Back along the line I went, and chose--oh, well!--an old favourite I
had read many times before.

I hunted out a hammock and slung it comfortably from the posts on the
front veranda, where I could lie and smoke and read; also where I could
look away across the Bay and rest my eyes on the quiet scene when they
should grow weary.

Late in the afternoon, when I was beginning to grow tired of my
indolence, I heard the thud, thud of a gasoline launch as it came up
the Bay. It passed between Rita's Isle and the wharf, and held on,
turning in to Jake Meaghan's cove.

I wondered who the visitor could be, then I went back to my reading.

Not long after, a shadow fell across my book and I jumped up.

"Pray, don't let me disturb you, my son," said a soft, well-modulated,
masculine voice. "Stay where you are. Enjoy your well-earned rest."

A little, frail-looking, pale-faced, elderly gentleman was at my elbow.

He smiled at me with the smile of an angel, and my heart went out to
him at once, so much so that I could have hugged him in my arms.

"My name is William Auld," he continued. "I am the medical missionary.
What is yours, my son?"

He held out his hand to me.

"George Bremner," I replied, gripping his. "Let me bring you a chair."

I went inside, and when I returned he was turning over the leaves of my
book.

"So you are a book lover?" he mused. "Well, I would to God more men
were book lovers, for