Long Lauchie came suddenly to the surface, this time with a precious pearl: "And showing mercy unto thousands," he continued softly. "Oh, yes, indeed and indeed, unto thousands, mercy unto thousands!" He sank again into the ocean of his imagination, and the tide of conversation flowed over him unheeded.
"'Visiting the sins of the father upon the children,'" repeated Big Malcolm bitterly. He dropped his head into his hands and groaned.
There was a long silence. These men were facing a great problem in the building up of this new nation, one which presented graver difficulties than they had met even in the toil and stress of breaking the forest. In the early days the social problem had not arisen; the settler had been too busy to permit of its troubling him. He needed all his time and strength to battle with this new land and compel her to give him his due of bread and shelter. But now, the stern young stepmother was yielding to those whom she recognised as worthy to be her sons, and was rewarding them with wider pasture-lands and waving fields of grain. Now the pioneer found time to draw breath and look about him. All through the years of weary hardship, homesickness for the old land had been heavy on his heart and his love for it had grown. And now, with some time for sentiment and reflection, he found his thoughts turning thither; old loves were re-awakened, old traditions revived, old enmities fanned into flame. The still wild stretches of forest called on all sides for wild, free action; the wind swept down over the Oro hills, straight from the vast expanse of the Great Lakes, setting the blood leaping for vigorous action. Little wonder, then, that in their first days of leisure men should go a few steps farther back towards the savage stage from which we are all such a short distance removed. And little wonder, too, that the wiser ones trembled lest their new land of promise, now so smiling, so prodigal of her favours, might be scarred with the marks of evil.
And so, these simple seers, these men, ignorant in the world's wisdom, but many of them secure in the knowledge of One, whom to know is life eternal, turned in their fear and perplexity to the fountain-head of righteousness.
"We must be having a prayer meeting, lads," said Praying Donald at length. "We could be having them all this winter, once a week, and maybe the good Lord will be sending us a minister."
"Eh, if we could get a meenister like auld Angus McGregor!" said Store Thompson. "Ah jist heerd him once, but it was a veesitation, aye, jist a veesitation, like. D'ye mind yon sermon, Lauchie, on 'Simon Peter, lovest thou me'?"
Long Lauchie awoke from his reverie with a start. The mention of the great Scottish preacher set going a train of tender memories. "Eh, Mr. McGregor!" he cried, "Mr. McGregor,—eh, there will not be such men nowadays I will be fearing. He was the man of God, indeed—yes—oh, yes——"
And as he faded away into the distance, the others made the necessary arrangements. They would hold a series of prayer meetings in the Oa and the Glen to last during the winter. Store Thompson made a feeble suggestion that they might join the Methodists, Tom Caldwell's faction in the Flats. For Tom, who was as active at wrestling in prayer as in any other sphere, in company with the population of the Tenth, had secured the services of a primitive Methodist preacher, and was holding nightly meetings in the schoolhouse, where much good was done. But the noisy devotions of the Flats met with little favour in the sight of the Oa. Praying Donald, conscious of the purity of their motive, had visited the Methodists once, and had now little to say in commendation.
"They will be doing the best they know, James," he declared, "but the Lord will be taking no pleasure in tumult and confusion, and we will jist be holding our meetings at the neighbours' houses, whatever."
And so the first meeting was arranged to be held at Long Lauchie's, and, before parting, the little group knelt about the boxes and bales, and in low, solemn tones like the breaking of waves on a rocky shore, Praying Donald besought the Eternal Father for a blessing on this new land and an instilling of the righteousness that exalteth a nation.