“To thank his rescuer, he felt, was not within the power of words; but reparation was in part possible, and his one thought was to make it.
“‘We won’t talk of that now,’ answered Knollys. ‘I know all about it, Jack! I saw the whole thing; and we just won’t say anything more about it, old fellow!’
“But Wright had fainted from the pain and the shock, and did not hear the forgiveness in Bert’s voice.
“The next day a letter went from Wright’s sick-bed to the president of the college. Wright wanted to tell everything; but on Bert’s advice he merely confessed that he had cribbed, without saying how, and resigned his claim to the scholarship. At Commencement, therefore, it was announced by the president that the Latin scholarship had been won by B. Knollys. Many conflicting rumors, of course, went abroad among the students; but to no one except Will Allison was the whole truth told. As for Wright, a new point of view seemed all at once to have opened before his eyes. The loftier standard which he now learned to set himself, he adhered to throughout the rest of his course, and then carried forth with him into what have proved very creditable and successful relations with the world.”
“Queerman has grown didactic,” said I. “That is surely not the tone for a canoe trip. Ranolf, it’s your turn to take the platform. Let us have something that is simple, unmedicated adventure!”
“I’ll tell you a bicycle story,” said Ranolf; “an unromantic tale of a romantic land. It is all about a bull and a bicycle in the land of Evangeline.”
A BULL AND A BICYCLE.
“It was in the autumn of 1889, while the old, high wheels were still in use, that I rode through the Evangeline land with a fellow-wheelman from Halifax. We rolled lazily along a well-kept road, and sang the praises of Nova Scotia’s scenery and air.
“Ahead of us, across a wide, flashing water, the storied expanse of Minas, towered the blue-black bastion of Cape Blomidon, capped with rolling vapors. To our left, and behind us, rose fair, rounded hills, some thickly wooded, others with orchards and meadows on their slopes; while to our right lay far unrolled those rich diked lands which the vanished Acadian farmers of old won back from the sea.
“Though another race now held these lovely regions, we felt that the landscape, through whatever vicissitudes, must lie changelessly under the spell of one enchantment,—the touch of the well-loved poet. We felt that something more than mere beauty of scene, however wonderful, was needed to explain the exalted mood which had taken possession of two hungry wheelmen like ourselves; and we acknowledged that additional something in the romance of history and song.