it was
problematical. In Stella's case, Mrs Murchison actually changed her mind
on the way to church; and Abby, who had sat through the sermon
expecting Dorothy Maud, which she thought lovely, publicly cried with
disappointment. Stella was the youngest, and Mrs Murchison was thankful
to have a girl at last whom she could name without regard to her own
relations or anybody else's. I have skipped about a good deal, but I
have only left out two, the boys who came between Abby and Stella. In
their names the contemporary observer need not be too acute to discover
both an avowal and to some extent an enforcement of Mr Murchison's
political views; neither an Alexander Mackenzie nor an Oliver Mowat
could very well grow up into anything but a sound Liberal in that part
of the world without feeling himself an unendurable paradox. To christen
a baby like that was, in a manner, a challenge to public attention; the
faint relaxation about the lips of Dr Drummond--the best of the
Liberals himself, though he made a great show of keeping it out of
the pulpit--recognized this, and the just perceptible stir of the
congregation proved it. Sonorously he said it. "Oliver Mowat, I baptize
thee in the Name of the Father--" The compliment should have all the
impressiveness the rite could give it, while the Murchison brothers and
sisters, a-row in the family pew, stood on one foot with excitement as
to how Oliver Mowat would take the drops that defined him. The verdict
was, on the way home, that he behaved splendidly. Alexander Mackenzie,
the year before, had roared.

He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously,
behind the woodpile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity;
and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but
his rights. Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood
inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances;
and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till,
observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a
pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted.
The Murchisons were all imaginative.

The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still "tormented." Poor Alec's
rights--to a present of pocket-money on the Queen's Birthday--were
common ones, and almost statutory. How their father, sitting comfortably
with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin,
reading t