dainty letter from his betrothed,
brought that night from the city, lay upon his breast; but honey and
gall mingled strangely in its offerings, and many a bitter word bore
heavy on his heart. No one of all that merry party was readier for song,
or jest, or manly sport, than he; and yet he, too, had his share of that
bitter cup which mortals call sorrow.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VI.

ADDITIONS TO THE PARTY.--AN INDIAN OUTFIT.--A CONTESTED ELECTION.

The following day was Sunday, and was spent as most Sabbaths are spent
by similar parties in such out-of-the-way places. A few members of the
household drove off across the ice of the Western Bar to a little
country church; but the goose-shooters cared not to display their half
savage dress, and tanned and blistered faces, to the over-close
inspection of the church-going farmers and their curious "_women
folks_."

Accordingly, Risk passed most of the day luxuriously stretched out on
the sofa, reading the Church Magazine, while Davies, on the opposite
side of the fire, in the recesses of an arm-chair covered with a buffalo
robe, devoted the larger portion of his time to the Weekly Wesleyan.
Creamer, after a cursory glance at a diminutive prayer-book, spent most
of the day in a comparison of sea-going experiences and apocryphal
adventures with Captain Lund, in much the same manner as two redoubtable
masters of fence employ their leisure in launching at each other's
impregnable defence, such blows as would prove mortal against less
skilled antagonists.

By the middle of the afternoon Lund had related his sixth story, being
the veracious history of how one Louis McGraw, a famous fishing-skipper
of Mingan, rode out a tremendous gale on the Orphan Bank, with both
cables out, the storm-sail set, her helm lashed amidships, and the crew
fastened below as tightly as possible. It is hardly worth while to
detail how the crew were bruised and battered by the terrible rolling of
the schooner; it may be left to the imagination of the intelligent
reader when he learns that, when the storm abated, the skipper found,
besides innumerable "kinks" in the cables, and sea-weed in the rigging,
_both topmasts broken short off_, indubitable proof, to the nautical
mind, that the Rechabite had been rolled over and over again, like an
empty barrel, in that terrible sea.

Creamer had just begun, by way of retaliation, his favorite "yarn" of
the ingenious diplomacy of one Jem Jarvis, his f