eet vibrant call again. "Five
o'clock--come on--remember!"

Daniel remembered. The rules of the Rev. Nathaniel North's house were
like the law of the Medes and Persians. Daniel had never met a Mede or
a Persian, but in his mind he pictured them as persons with
reddish-gray hair and beards and smooth-shaven upper lips, wearing
white neckcloths and long black broadcloth coats, and requiring
absolute punctuality at meal time, church time, school time, and
family prayers. Esther's voice recalled him from the romance of the
coasting-hill to the reality of life. He considered the consequences
of being late for Saturday evening worship and made up his mind that
they were too much for him.

"Come on, Ruthie," he cried, picking up the cord of her small sled,
which she had forsaken for the greater glory and excitement of riding
behind her brother on the bob. The child put her hand in his, and they
ran together over the creaking snow to the place where their older
sister was waiting, her slender figure in blue jacket and skirt
outlined against the white field, and her golden hair shining like an
aureole around her rosy face in the intense bloom of the winter
sunset.

The three young Norths were the flower of Glendour: a Scotch village
in western Pennsylvania, where the spirits of John Knox and Robert
Burns lived face to face, separated by a great gulf. On one side of
the street, near the river, was the tavern, where the lights burned
late, and the music went to the tune of "Wandering Willie" and "John
Barleycorn." On the other side of the street, toward the hills, was
the Presbyterian church, where the sermons were an hour long, and the
favourite lyric was

"A charge to keep I have."

The Rev. Nathaniel North's "charge to keep" was the spiritual welfare
of the elect, and especially of his own motherless children. To guide
them in the narrow way, unspotted from the world, to train them up in
the faith once delivered to the saints and in the customs which that
faith had developed among the Scotch Covenanters, was the great desire
of his heart. For that desire he would gladly have suffered martyrdom;
and into the fulfilling of his task he threw a strenuous tenderness, a
strong, unfaltering, sincere affection that bound his children to him
by a love which lay far deeper than all their outward symptoms of
restiveness under his strict rule.

This is a thing that seldom gets into stories. People of the world do
not understan