"No. And don't talk any more about it. It's just this way, Jock, I've no choice in the matter. If it was my last cent, and I knew I'd go to jail for it to-morrow, I'd help Angus. I just couldn't see him want. It's all right. I'll stay on in Algonquin a few more years, and we'll see what'll happen. Good-night."
"Yes, and good-night to all your ambitions and the Holy Land too."
"Not a bit of it! Ambition be hanged. I don't care about that. But we're going to the Holy Land yet, if we put it off until seventy times seven. We'll wait till young Roderick's grown up and pays us back, and then we'll go. Indeed, I'm going to refuse positively to go to the New Jerusalem until I've seen the old!"
He swung away up the street as bright and gay as though he had just accepted a fine new position instead of refusing one. He was so happy that he softly sang the hymn that had opened the good work of the evening. It was very appropriate:
"Faith and hope and love we see
Joining hands in unity,
But the greatest of the three
And the best is love."
He was passing near Jock's house so he roared out the "Amen" in the hope that the elder had not yet gone to sleep. And Mrs. Leslie's Viney declared the next morning that she done heah dat Lawyah Ed and J. P. Thornton gwine home straight ahead all de bressed night, and she did 'clar dey was still goin' when she put on de oatmeal mush for de breakfus!
CHAPTER III
LIFE'S YOUNG MARINER
On a hazy August afternoon the little steamer Inverness,—Captain, James McTavish—came sailing across Lake Simcoe with her long white bowsprit pointing towards the cedar-fringed gates opening into Lake Algonquin. She was a trim little craft, painted all blue and white like the water she sailed. Captain McTavish, who was also her owner, had named her after his birthplace. He loved the little steamer, and pronounced her name with a tender lingering on the last syllable, and a softening of the consonants, that no mere Sassenach tongue could possibly imitate.