dawaska River three years agone; of Adam Henry, the blind
fiddler; of bright, warm-hearted Pattie Chown, the belle of the ball,
and the long drive home in the frosty night.

Late Carscallen was thinking of a brother whom he had heard preach his
first sermon in Edinburgh twenty years before. And Late Carscallen, slow
of speech and thought, had been full of pride and love of that brilliant
brother. In the natural course of things, they had drifted apart, the
slow and uncouth one to make his home at last in the Far North, and to
be this night on his way to the Barren Grounds. But as he stood with the
cup to his lips he recalled the words of a newspaper paragraph of a
few months before. It stated that "the Reverend James Carscallen,
D.D., preached before Her Majesty on Whitsunday, and had the honour of
lunching with Her Majesty afterwards." Remembering that, Late Carscallen
rubbed his left hand joyfully against his blanketed leg and drank.

Cloud-in-the-Sky's thoughts were with the present, and his "Ugh!" of
approval was one of the senses purely. Instead of drinking to absent
friends he looked at the sub-factor and said: "How!" He drank to the
subfactor.

Jaspar Hume had a memory of childhood; of a house beside a swift-flowing
river, where a gentle widowed mother braced her heart against misfortune
and denied herself and slaved that her son might be educated. He had
said to her that some day he would be a great man, and she would be paid
back a hundredfold. And he had worked hard at school, very hard. But one
cold day of spring a message came to the school, and he sped homewards
to the house beside the dark river down which the ice was floating,--he
would remember that floating ice to his last day, and entered a quiet
room where a white-faced woman was breathing away her life. And he fell
at her side and kissed her hand and called to her; and she waked for a
moment only and smiled on him, and said: "Be good, my boy, and God
will make you great." Then she said she was cold, and some one felt
her feet--a kind old soul who shook her head sadly at him; and a voice,
rising out of a strange smiling languor, murmured: "I'll away, I'll away
to the Promised Land--to the Promised Land.... It is cold--so cold--God
keep my boy!" Then the voice ceased, and the kind old soul who had
looked at him, pityingly folded her arms about him, and drawing his
brown head to her breast, kissed him with flowing eyes and whispered:
"Come away, laddi