blue
ribbons, knows you. O, my dear friend, this is awful. Better be back in
Toronto than shut up in a railway car with two unblushing women."

"Stay here," said Coristine, making way for his friend, "they'll never
dare come into this car after us." Yet his eye followed the retreating
form of the South American warrior with apprehension. What if he should
bring his 'dare young misthress' and her friend into the atmosphere of
stale tobacco after their lawful game? Wilkinson sat down despairingly
and coughed. "I feel very like the least little nip," he said faintly,
"but it's in my knapsack, and I will not enter that car of foul
conspiracy again for all the knapsacks and flasks in the world."

Now, Coristine had smoked two big pipes, and felt that it was dry work,
but loyalty to his friend made him braver than any personal necessity
would have done. "It's sick you're looking, Farquhar, my dear," he said,
"and it's no friend of your's I'd be, and leave you without comfort in
such a time of trouble. Here's for the knapsack, and woe betide the man
or woman that stops me." So up he rose, and strode out of the car,
glowering fiercely at the second-class passengers and all the rest, till
he reached the vacated seats, from which he silently, and in deep inward
wrath, gathered up the creations of cardboard and patent cloth, and
retreated, grinding his teeth as he heard the veteran call out behind
him, "Would yeez moind comin' this way a bit, Mishter?" He paid no
attention to that officious old man, but hurried back to the
smoking-car, where he extracted Wilkinson's flask from its flannel
surroundings, removed the metal cup, poured out a stiff horn, and
diluted it at the filter. "Take this, old man," he said sternly,
pressing it to the lips of the sufferer, "it'll set you up like a new
pin." So the schoolmaster drank and was comforted, and Coristine took a
nip also, and they felt better, and laughed and joked, and said
simultaneously, "It's really too absurd about these girls, ha, ha!"

Apprehension made the time seem long to the travellers, who gazed out of
the windows upon a fine agricultural country, with rolling fields of
grain, well-kept orchards and substantial houses and barns. They admired
the church on the hill at Holland Landing, and the schoolmaster told his
friend of a big anchor that had got stuck fast there on its way to the
Georgian Bay in 1812. "I bet you the sailors wouldn't have left it
behind if it had been an