farms and shuts them off from one another and from the world outside,
and peers in through the little windows of the log houses looking
so small and lonely, but so beautiful in their forest frames. At the
nineteenth cross-road the forest gives ground a little, for here the
road runs right past the new brick church, which is almost finished, and
which will be opened in a few weeks. Beyond the cross, the road leads
along the glebe, and about a quarter of a mile beyond the corner there
opens upon it the big, heavy gate that the members of the Rev. Alexander
Murray's congregation must swing when they wish to visit the manse. The
opening of this gate, made of upright poles held by auger-holes in a
frame of bigger poles, was almost too great a task for the minister's
seven-year-old son Hughie, who always rode down, standing on the hind
axle of the buggy, to open it for his father. It was a great relief
to him when Long John Cameron, who had the knack of doing things for
people's comfort, brought his ax and big auger one day and made a kind
of cradle on the projecting end of the top bar, which he then weighted
with heavy stones, so that the gate, when once the pin was pulled out
of the post, would swing back itself with Hughie straddled on the top of
it.

It was his favorite post of observation when waiting for his mother to
come home from one of her many meetings. And on this particular March
evening he had been waiting long and impatiently.

Suddenly he shouted: "Horo, mamma! Horo!" He had caught sight of the
little black pony away up at the church hill, and had become so wildly
excited that he was now standing on the top bar frantically waving his
Scotch bonnet by the tails. Down the slope came the pony on the gallop,
for she knew well that soon Lambert would have her saddle off, and that
her nose would be deep into bran mash within five minutes more. But her