Lester the Loyalist :: :: University of Virginia Library

Lester the Loyalist

A Romance of the Founding of Canada. By Douglas Sladen

Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton (1856-1947)

LESTER THE LOYALIST.

DEDICATED TO TWO SISTERS,

LESTER THE LOYALIST

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LESTER THE LOYALIST.

A ROMANCE OF THE FOUNDING OF CANADA

DEDICATED TO TWO SISTERS,

Mrs. Robert Reid and Mrs. George Washington Stephens of Montreal.

LESTER THE LOYALIST

I.

Haughty was Jonathan Sherwood, well-born, an opulent merchant;
None in New York stood higher—his friends the highest officials,
Aye and the Governor too, till the recent troubles with England.
Goodly in stature was he, with resolute clear-cut features,
Heavily browed and eyebrowed, and eyes which made strangers uneasy,
Blue as the sea when the sky is clear, but deep in them lurking
Signs of a gathering storm or tracks of a dragon in ambush;—
Eyes, which said “the Ship of the State is right on the quick sands;
You, Sir, and you, are knave or tool; and the good ship must perish,
Utterly now at this present, if it be not for Jonathan Sherwood.”

Happy was he in his home, his beautiful home by the Hudson,
High on a hill, and deep in trees with the river looped round it,
Square, wide-spreading, two-storied, with three of its faces verandahed
And all its front a porch, vast-columned like Rome's Pantheon,
Crowning the river for miles from its vantage of headland and highland.
All of wood was the house, save the bountiful kitchen chimney,
Fit for an abbot or earl, in the days when convents and castles
Housed their hundreds of cowls or helms; and the panels hid priest-holes
Guarding no longer priests, but massive plate and cut crystal,

Almost as precious as plate. Not a chamber but boasted its secret,
And the porch opened into a hall that pierced to the rear of the mansion,
Rising high as the roof, and spanned with a gallery archwise
Bridging two mighty stairways, whose broadening, circular bases
Cleft the hall into two, each hung with its portraits and weapons,
And its trophies of wealth. Without, were gardens—the vineyard—the pleasaunce,
Where lovers were screened—the stables and men's homes—almost a hamlet.

Happy was Jonathan Sherwood, as he stepped on his chariot, or often,
When the wind blew up from the bay, on a swift-winged boat. For his mansion,
More than its wealth, than its ease, held a wife and a womaning daughter.
More than his wife, who moved like a queen, unconsciously haughty,
Gracious at heart, and received his guests, and sat at his table
Sweet with a grace of her own, he loved this womaning daughter,
Dorothy Sherwood, the last of his race, whom seventeen Aprils
Had dowered with their tender sunshine, as witness the gold in the auburn
Of that delicate head, and the soft, fresh blue, like sky after showers,
Of the eyes in that high bred face, with the beauty that makes an hungred,
Dimple chin, pleading lip, fine nose with quivering nostril,
And maidenhood's Mayflower cheek, that should shame the wild roses thereafter.
Unseared by the summer of fashion, she danced through her life, a June zephyr,
Fresh, bright, sweet as spring, with her gentleness thrice-over gentle
From her pure patrician grace;—of all Manhattan's daughters
Daintiest in brocade, and sweetest in simple muslin.

Dorothy walks in the garden. A footfall nears; and a shimmer
Lights up the blue of her eyes, and rose tints deepen, and laughter
Trills between mischief and joy. She is caught, a conspirator captive,
Fain to fall in with the foe, and betray the defence, and take service,
As daughters with lovers are leagued to conquer their sires the world over.

Fair headed student, with form and face like the Hercules David
Grim Michel Angelo made to stand in the heart of his Florence
At the door of the Palace Old, which was built to endure forever,
David with brow and feature of Egypt's Monolith giants,
But limbs of athletic Greece—Youth with the eye of Minerva,
Large and sage and grey, what seekest thou liere in the garden?

Boy, were thy Father alive, with his silvery tones of persuasion,
Resistless as truth in the Courts—thy Father, the Advocate Lester,
Thou hadst no need in the bushes to lurk, but wouldst drive to the porchway,
Ring up Jonathan Sherwood, and bid for thine happiness boldly.

But now, young dreamer at King's, with the map of thy life after college
Blank, though dazzlingly white, not even the latitudes ruled yet,
Thou art no prize for the hand of Jonathan Sherwood's daughter,
Thou art no prize for the hand of exquisite Dorothy Sherwood,
Thou art a thief and a robber, that enterest not by the gateway.

And now the hour draws night when the echo of wheels, or a footfall

Down on the water-stair, like the crow of the cock to a vision,
Bids thee away, and Dorothy learns that love, like the roses,
Has his handful of thorns for every bloom on the briar.
But today is gold and crimson, for Jonathan Sherwood lingers
Till the woods of the further shore have drunk up the glory of sunset.

Dorothy, lean thine aureoled head on a stalwart shoulder!
And, if ardent lips should press its silkiness proudly,
Aye or the shapely neck, or the veiny ingenuous eyelids,
Or the soft white brow embayed in gold, or the velvet and peach bloom
Of Youth's fruit-rivalling cheek—aye, even the ruby chalice
Drained by the revellers of love—why yield thee and sign surrender!
Strong hands pinion thy wrists with loving pressure, and armed words
Beat at the door of thine heart.

O lovers, and lovers, and lovers,
This same old story of siege, and parley, and sudden surrender,
Belongs to each age and clime. It sailed in men's hearts with Columbus,
And, soon as the first light foot had rested in Hispaniola,
The seed in the New World's soil was rooted to bloom forever.

Meanwhile Jonathan late in his Club—a Whig Coffeehouse parlour,
Soared irascibly on, addressing his fellow merchants,
Most heard and most laid to heart by the hangers-on in the doorway,
Unnoticed and unejected in storm and stress of opinion.

He began with the masts of Maine and its fishers and waterfalls wasted,
And so through the whole Thirteen, till he came to the merchants of Boston,
Most cruelly wronged of all—although in the matter of customs
Their conscience was somewhat lax—this importing of tea as molasses,
And smuggling with Holland and Spain was little enough to his liking,
Grasping, hard man that he was—his trade was in buying cheaply
And selling at cruel credit. The law was his friend and accomplice;
He broke not its veriest tittle or jot—good Pharisee, narrow,
Merciless, proud, selfrighteous. But, nathless, a farseeing merchant,
He groaned at the channels for trade which the laws for the Colonies muzzled,
And, seeing himself in a dream with his wealth centupled, when smuggling,
Having no duties, should die and the smugglers—their calling discounted,
Wither like weeds without soil from the path of the honest merchant,
He raged and moaned that the King was cozened and deafened and blinded,
And, lashing himself in his wrath like the sea in a tempest, he thundered
At Great Britain and all her works; and raved at the House of Commons,
Ever, and now-thrice corrupt: and his voice was lost in his passion
At the Tory misgovernment, Tools and Traitors and Tyrants and—Tories.

Hot resolutions were passed; and a sturdily worded remonstrance,
“Drawn at request of the club by the patriot Jonathan Sherwood,”
Sent by next ship to the King—from the merchants a faithful remonstrance,
To the idlers, who listened unnoticed, an incitement to arms and resistance.
Then he went home in his pride—he thought of the Seven Bishops—
But with anger slumbering lightly—a Jephthah—for lo at his threshhold,

In the hour of his triumph his daughter, his beautiful Dorothy, met him,
With her girlish softness and rhythmic grace and the smile of pathos,
Which made the glint of one golden head the visible presence
Of rapture at fête or rout,—and stood like Queen Esther before him,
Waiting the outstretched sceptre to open her heart to her master.
But lo! too one, whose advent was gall in the goblet, beside her—
Lester! the fathers heart, with its wakeful dreams of ambition,
Read in an instant the warning, and closed his ears like an idol's,
Deaf because made of stone. She fled from his presence, like Vashti,
And wept in her chamber apart, refusing to glow in her fairness
To the lords whom his fancy chose,—after sobbing aloud to Lester,
Before her sire in his wrath, that him would she wed and none other,
Though she were lone as long as Penelope, lorn of Ulysses,
Aye—till the Lions of England waved no longer o'er New York City.
And Lester went forth with a vow on his lips to conquer her father,
By dazzling that haughty ambition, like knights in the days of olden.

II.

War was over; the King knew now that, though he might vanquish
In a hundred battles by land the armies of French and Revolters,
And a hundred fights in a hundred bays the navies of Europe,
Hurled at the navy of England, French, Dutch, Swede, Spaniard and Russian,
The half of his colonists' hearts were lost beyond reach of recapture,
Though, while they were faithful to England, nigh half of England was bunring

That they should be healed of their wrongs—and had they but stayed for it, Justice
Was their's, without shedding of blood or rending the child from the mother.

War was over; and peace was declared; and the friends of resistance,
Whose watchword was “freedom the birthright of all,” were yelling that freedom
Meant but freedom from England, and that any desirous of freedom
To be true to the land of his Fathers, was deserving of death, or outlaw.

Charlatan Liberty, despot at heart, thy clamour for freedom
Is claptrap for change of power, and when lordship lays down his sceptre,
Thou seizest it, cheering hoarsely, and usest thy sceptre in club wise,
Most merciless, most malicious, because most minute of despots.

Jonathan Sherwood, Whig, stood right in the path way of Vengeance,
He who had raised in New York the first strong voice of remonstrance.
For had he not, after petitioning the King as his faithful servant,
In tones of usher to scolded child, continued his service,
Steadfast, refusing to draw his sword, or disclaim his allegiance,
Causing by one example more hindrance than hundreds of foemen
To the Freedom which claimed for itself, the rights it denied to others?

Jonathan Sherwood, when war burst forth, to his utter anguish,
Drew no weapon and joined no side:—his King and his Country
Fought less, the fewer who fought. He loved both his King and his Country.

Others there were, who sheathed their swords, with the cry that resistance
Of their few to the might of England must end in o'erwhelming disaster,
Not dreaming of English States calling the ancient foe, from whom England
Had so lately secured their homes, to arm them against their Mother,
Or of France sending fleets and armies more glibly than England, or Europe,—
France, Spain, Holland, and Sweden and Russia hurling their navies
In one vast onslaught on England, with the ocean twixt her and her armies.
Others there were, great merchants, who dreamed they might win, but winning,
Winning, what would they be? a race of respectable bumpkins
Cut off from the civilized world and doomed to go down to the ages
Degenerate year by year—with the wharves of New York decaying.

Bitter was hate against all: but it waxed and waxed against Sherwood,
Their best—in his Pharisee way. For that one, who had led the remonstrants,
Fought not, when fighting came, was a falling away. “An apostate
Weakened the sacred truth of the cause. If the cause was sacred
Why should an earnest man lose faith at its baptism, straightway,
But the cause was sacred: and he who desecrates that which is sacred,
Sacred in his own creed, is a parricide—venemous reptile.”

While the war was waged, in New York, a Loyalist stronghold,
Insult, hands refused, backs turned, a significant silence,
Sudden, emphatic, scornful, a feud to all meetings and dealings
On 'change or at home, were all that hatred could bare against him.

But when Peace was declared, and New York given up, the Revolters
Waxed bold, ere the troops were withdrawn, and, now in authority, trampled
The rebellious knaves who maintained that the right of every free man
Was to hold what opinions he pleased.

That Judges, Divines, and great Lawyers
The shrewdest and wealthiest Merchants, the Masters, who taught their children,
Were worthy, or had the wit to think for themselves—and should cherish
The faith they had treasured from youth, and their fathers' fathers before them,
Was monstrous, and worthy of pains—of death. And if confiscation,
With bare life, humbled, ill-treated, and watched like thieves, was allowed them,
Out of the bountiful mercy and grace of their brothers, triumphant,
Happy were they, in good case, and much to be envied. Malignants,
Faint-hearted Whigs like Sherwood, were marks above all for malice.
The day saw him bruised with foul eggs, tar-scalded, half smothered in feathers,
The night saw his warehouses wrecked and his home invaded by maskers,
Who tore him, cursed, from the arms of his terrified wife and daughter,
Scared in belief of murder, and failing his oath to Congress,
Left him tied up like a dog, by the neck, half hung, in the market,
Helpless with cord-cut wrists to loose himself, and well guarded
From the aid of the tender women, who alone would have dared, till the morning,
That the market-folk might flout him. And lists of proscription proclaimed him
Outlawed, stripped of all.

Then at last, with his wife and daughter,

He left his home, his all, and fled to the troops for protection,
Thankful for life and limb, till the ships sailed forth with the exiles
To found a new nation with English hearts mid the frosts of Acadia.

III.

After the voyages'perils, the tides and the fogs of Fundy,
Tempests and merciless coasts, they came to the harbour majestic
Scooped by the royal St. John from the forested rocks of Acadia.
And, sailing under the islets, they breasted the Public Landing.
And here the Loyalist exiles, THE FATHERS OF CANADA, landed,
Resting eight days in the ships.
A few log huts in the forest,
Such was the city that greeted their eyes, their own habitations
Tents—later sheds of huts—then stout log-cabins—no framed house
Saving the House of God. A city of rock and forest,
Hewn down in streets—mere strips for the tents—and with wild men and wild beasts,
Yet in its depths.
The rock and the forest have moulded the settlers,
Staunch, bold men, defiant of storm, with the awe of the forest
And its sheltering nature their own, who have made of the rock and the forest
Cities of men, that feed the hungry and house the homeless,
Sent from less generous lands.
At the birth of the Loyalist City,

There were strange sights to pass, learned Judges, eloquent Lawyers,
Merchants once housed like princes, Physicians of souls and bodies,
Ragged or coarsely clad, felling trees or laying their log huts,
Carrying or dragging burdens. There were stumps in the street, and of trading,
Saving in labour or logs, there was none. One thought was in all minds,
To live in stout huts well-lined, ere the anger of winter o'ertook them,
Five thousand human souls, nigh all of them gently-nurtured.
For the man who abandons all, for the sake of an oath or his conscience,
Is not he who has little to lose in goods or repute, but the highest
In rank, repute and wealth, (as witness the Jacobites—chieftains,
And men of cavalier birth). Pride thinks: and to Pride it is torture,
To live in its own contempt, for the purchase of ease and safety.
Poverty thinks not, but works: and freedom to labour in safety,
Freedom to work at its natural work, is its creed and its country.
This was in early days, ere the bounty of Britain had rendered
His losses to each, and chosen the men who, bred Judges and Lawyers,
Had marched at her regiments heads, the fathers of law in the new land,
While the former rich and the former poor were receiving their rations
In food and clothing, and boards for roofs, and tools for the building.
And Sherwood, erst voice of the Whigs, groaned that he, a principal merchant,
Should be toiling with common men, the life of a peasant before him.
Was it for this he had stirred men's souls, and championed grievance,
And written wild words to the King, that his words should recoil on his own head,

And the King be swept away with the wrongs, and the tempest he'd wakened
Tear his own roof from his head?

This life with all things in common,
With all that makes life gentle and sweet swallowed up in the earthquake,
This life, as a peasant mid peasants, was Hell.

It were better to wander
Forth in the forest alone than to have these witnesses glaring
Full in one's face, and so he hired an Indian to guide him
To a place where a man might live by the fruits of the earth.

Clearwater,
With its bounty of fish and berries, and the deer and the duck in the winter,
Was a whilom Melicetes' camp, abandoned for huntings more distant
When the white men thronged to the river-mouth: and here the guide led him
A lake of glass-clear water, the heart of a mountainous forest,
With satellite lakes and a grassy peninsula, facing an island
To break the storms of the lake. Vast trees, and the fairest of field-flowers!
The season was June, and the land wore its summer smile; and the sad heart
Of the fallen Dives yearned for the rest of the place, and its barrier,
A dozen leagues of dark forest twixt Pride, and all that reminded.

Grants were free to the asker, and the money concealed on his person,
When he fled from his warehouse and home, sufficed to pay for the cartage
Of the stores, tools and nails the Government gave, and for aid in the building
Of the rude backwoodsman's hut, with its one low room and an attic
Stolen from the height of the roof;—for thus much Jonathan Sherwood

Beyond the wont of backwoodsmen demanded, for wife and daughter.
Of logs was the house, laid crosswise with turf-filled chinks; and the doorway
Narrow and low; and the windows mere port-holes. The kitchen ceiling,
Where they cooked and ate and lived, was barely the height of its master.
The daylight streamed through this ceiling—the floor of the attic, divided
Into two dens, with a port-hole each, by a screen of birch bark,
One for his daughter, and one for themselves, with a ladder for stairway.
Just such a cabin one sees in the depth of the Maskinonge forest
With a swart, beef-booted Canuck, his wife, grandmère and a dozen
Or score of barefooted children, one born to a year.

It was hither
In the shining Canadian August, when days are fierce, and young children
And delicate ladies yearn to the hills and the shore for shelter,
They drove with what Government gave, not a relic of all their abundance.
Naked came they into the world, and almost as naked
Went forth from their native land for freedom and life in Acadia.

IV.

Peaceful was Sherwood now, at his home in the beautiful forest.
After the peril from hate, and the hardship and toil of removal,
It was enough, when labour was o'er to sit where the sunset
Bathed in its mellow warmth the grassy knoll, which the forest
Left on one cape of the lake, a break in the mountain-rampart
Bastioned round and heavily treed from the ridge to the water.

Here would he sit and review the storm, which had burst on his country,
And how he had helped to gather the thunder, forgetting what Scripture
Foretells for the digger of pitfalls, and chide himself how in the lightning
His home and his fortunes were blasted.

How he yearned, like the fallen Satan,
For the heaven he hated and lost—the good days of Kingly oppression,
Tory misgovernment, monstrous abuses, and—general welfare.
So he would muse at eve, or resting mid toil, and then seizing
So he would muse at eve, or resting mid toil, and then seizing
His axe, cleft like one possessed, or listlessly leaned on its handle.

Not so Dorothy; little she recked of Whig or Tory,
Save that steel flashed out, and pistols rang, and old friendships
Ended in murderous words, and death by friends' hands thereafter;
Nor did she probe the loss of home and wealth like her father.
Life to her so friendly had been, and care such a stranger,
That she knew not the looks of want, when he came and stood naked before her.
And all in the transport had striven to lighten the hardships and forecasts
Of one so lovely and young, and unsoiled by the sweat of trouble.

Little she heeded their straitened home with its three little chambers,
Its peasants' fare; for oft she had dreamed of the forestlife camping
Friends less wealthy enjoyed, when the sun-blasted New York summer
Drove forth the women and children and wealthier men, and her father
Felt that wealth was good, and his summer-home by the Hudson.

Oft had she dreamed of escape from the ravening round of fashion,
Which rolled with its Juggernaut wheels on the daily life of the Sherwoods,
And envied her friends in the free wild life which wakens the body
Out of its city trance, and gives to the mind exhausted
Change, called rest.

To her it was rest—no changing of garments,
Neither observance of time. Tho'oft she was downcast, beholding
Her father bent with his woes—her mother too poor for a servant,
Toiling harder than servants, with none but herself as a helpmate,
And, whiles, for the brave boy-lover, who marched into life's stern battle
With a smile and a tear and a bounding heart to make fortune his captive.
And when her toils were done, or her Mother, with pulses of pity,
Opened the bars, the forest and lake were a land of enchantments.
Over all loved she the lake with its walls of rock, in their vesture
Of royal pines and spruces and maples and silvery birches,
Made gay, where a tree had fallen and its neighbours shared in its ruin,
With flower and fruit festoons and draping of lichen and fungus.

Right in the midst, that the lake might not lose its beauty in distance,
Rose a noble isle, in shape like a slumbering lion
Maned with pines—its flanks and paws of tawny-hued granite;
While on each side, as far as an active eye could wander,
Cape and bay disputed the banks like the shores of the ocean.

Here would she hie, to see the sun fount up through the forest,
Here, when his sunken orb filled half the sky with a glory
Mirrored scarlet and gold and purple, not one tint faded,
In the clear eye of the lake; and here when the moon, half-risen,
Shewed against her white face the bristling top of a pine-tree,
Like the fur of a panther beheld by the daring backwoodsman
High in the fork of a tree when he stalks by night.

At sunrise,
She pictured her dashing lover march into life's battle a-humming,
With jaunty cap, all itch for adventure and burning for glory;
And her blithe eyes flashed and laughed, for her heart refreshed by its-slumbers,
And flushed with the new-waked morn, was all hope with the world before it.
At sunset, weary with toils of the day she must heed for his safety,
And sigh, when she thought of the mountains to climb and the angel with sword-fire
At the gate of the garden—the din, and blood and exhaustion of conflict,
But when the moon's soft face, beloved of all lovers, bent o'er her,
She thought of the Lester she knew, boy-lover, shy student, high dreamer,
A Phoebus with skyey eyes and Phoebus locks, and in stature
Like a young god: and wept the grateful summerday shower
Of rapture and thanks to heaven, and nursed her secret.

Though sometimes
She dreamed of what might have been, had Fortune not felled them, and

Lester.........

And yet had Fortune smiled, she knew her father..................

Clearwater
The Indians named the lake, and Dorothy loved to sit by it,
Watching the kingfishers plunge and the sandsnipes glide, and the furminks
Climb up out of the water to eye the strange vision—all fearless,
Strangers to man, the scourge of the earth.

There were pools in the brook-mouth,
Sandy, not over-deep, and here she dipped first the beauty
Of her white arched slender feet, and, growing bolder with pleasure,
Her shapely legs, then her willowy waist, and her beautiful bosom,
Like twin magnolia-buds, in its ivory roundness, and fragrance,
As one would picture a Naiad a god might disturb in Tempe.
Far from discovery's gaze, for her father and mother were toiling
And other Whites there were none, and the Indians, while yet afar off,
Divining, would choose a more distant path; and yet her fair body
Whiles would flush rose with shame.

And glad she was when her mother
Crossing the lake to the bay which the snowfed river in spring time
Spoked with the trunks of trees, where lay the trout giants, would waft her,
Poised in the bow of the birchbark the Indian sold for the bauble,
Coral with silver bells, that Dorothy crowed at in babehood.
With the paddles feathery stroke, and only light bark between them
And the lake's soft depths, it seemed but a swift and unwearying swimming.
They fished at the sunset hour, when birds fly home to the water

And beasts creep forth to feed, and fish leap after the insects,
The hour when all nature awakes from the spell laid on her by noonday.
Then, when they paddled home, while her mother was broiling for supper
The mighty trout with their sides of silver and speckles of scarlet,
Forth to the forest she'd fare and loading her basket with berries,
Raspberries, blueberries, cherries, thank God for the beauty around her,
The carpet of moss with its pattern vermilioned in partridge-berries,
The brake of bushes, bluegrass and ferns, the trunks of the birches,
Nature's silverlaid columns, the dark, grave pine trees and spruces,
The chipmunk all chatter and scamper, and the hummingbird, daylight's firefly.

Salt pork and beans and potatoes and bread from a makeshift oven,
Kneaded by makeshift hands, what fare was this for the Sherwoods,
Though luscious berry, and pink-fleshed trout, and tasty brook-crayfish,
Could allay a woman's craving, and Sherwood, at work in his clearing,
Shot a partridge at times, or a bear in the dusk, or a heron?

And staunch of soul must he be who dwells in Canadian forests.
But Dorothy's mother shone out in Misfortune a genuine woman,
Gathered and cooked their food, and fashioned many a comfort,
With only the sharp-edged axe from the logs brought in for the firing;
Learned to swim and paddle and fish and handle the firearms,
And the life of the woods, with its shifts for eluding hunger and danger,
She who had given the mode, as hostess, to proud Manhattan.

So the Summer slipped past, and, Acadia's sorcerer, Autumn,
Seized the lightest and brightest green of the robes of the forest,
And made them flame with crimson and scarlet and orange and red-gold,
Transmuting the tender leaves with a breath that was fire at the noontide
And frost at the turn of night—and then the North's tyrant Winter,
Swooped in his chariot of storm and stripped the red glory of raiment
From Maple and Sumach and Cherry and Oak, till the pines and the spruces
Looked down on their fallen pride and the great snows reigned, and the Sherwoods
Walled in from all mankind, faced the wolfish Acadian December

Oh! it was hell, this winter—its utter loneliness, utter,
Its cruel and perilous cold in an ill-warmed, comfortless cabin.
But food they had—their rations—though coarse—and the rapids beside them
Ran too fiercely to freeze.

At last the winter was over,
Winter and spring, and Queen snow was dethroned and her hosts were defeated
And driven into the sea. Flowers rose: and a second year Summer
Reigned over forest and lake, and the Hymn of the Earth ascended.

V.

Summer for better and worse! there was more in the garden, more comforts
Hewn with the axe by ingenious hands from spruce-wood and birch bark.
But flour and pork were low, and money was none for the cartage

Of stores, which the Government gave, to the distant wilds of Clearwater.
And the clothes they had worn from New York—their all, for hatred had hurled them,
Naked of all they possessed, save what their bruised hands could carry,
And the clothes they received as settlers were rags for the hill-winds to sport with.

And Dorothy found her rapture a butterfly, dead in one summer.
Forest and lake were a wilderness now, not a garden of Nature.
Lost by the waters, blindfolded with woods, and jailed in by the mountains,
From all things which make a home, would they die as those children of Israel
Who died in the forty years of their wanderings after Canaan?

Autumn dismayed them, the red Mephistopheles guise of the forest,
The sickle-edged breath of the morning frost, and the wild whirr of duck's wings,
Were signs of the times that foretold the return of the ravening winter.

Winter! were it not better to slay thy wife and thy daughter,
And die on their graves thyself, than to see this monster devour them
Inch by inch? Far better to die by the hands of Revolters,
Burnt in thy house or stoned in the streets, or murdered in darkness,
Than these torments out-wearying Hell.

Already three months in midwinter,

And March and April to drag ere merciful May could unloosen
The fetters of frost and snow! Three months! They were dead already,
Had not the Indian braves, the magnanimous Melicete hunters
Brought them Caribou-meat and dug a hole in the lake-ice,
Five feet thick this year, and schooled them in keeping it open.

But seldom the Indians passed—and when the fish failed them, starvation
Leered and gaped in their faces, till at last, on one terrible evening,
Sherwood took down the snowshoes and said to the women “Tomorrow
Lo! we will pack our food and flee to the city, confessing
‘Friends we have erred in our pride: for good is the sight of his fellows,
To the greatest of mortal men, and solitude braves starvation.
Give but what ye have over, and set us to eat with you with your swineherds,
But friends do not let us die’” and he plaintively charged the women
“See ye what food remains! of late we have suffered so sorely
That it were sinful to leave one crust we could carry about us.”
So spake the man who had feasted like Kings, and outscorned the Spaniard
In his scorn of the poor from his sumptuous home by the Hudson.
Humbly he spoke, yet humbled was he: for mouldering trout-flesh,
Cured by unskilful hands—and left to the last (but not wasted:
Hunger had taught his stern lesson) was all that remained save the pork-bones
Boiled and reboiled for broth—and berries despair had collected,
Withered long since for the lack of vessels and sugar, not knowing
How their bounty was drawn from the Maples abounding on all sides.

Then a great chill fell on their hearts, like the frost without, and the tempest
Shrieked like a fiend, and they lay awake and shuddered for daylight.

Day never came: there prevailed a horror of darkness, till Sherwood,
Opened the door and let fall a wall of snow on the threshold.

Clearing as best they might by the light of the last poor sludgelamp
(Hunger had taken the rest for the fat on the rag-wicks) all straining,
With one vast heave they closed the door on the might of the stormwind,
And gave themselves up to Heaven;—they were buried alive in a snow-drift,
Buried house and roof, and fly they could not; for the snowdrift,
Soft as quick sand, would hardly bear an Indian's snowshoe,
Until they reached the wood; and the track was hidden, and flurries
Dazzled their sight, and the bitter wind, the fiercest of frost winds,
Swept through their rags like a scythe.

They had nothing to hope from but Heaven,
So in his frozen heart he groaned; but his wife, accustomed
To a woman's end urance of ill and bondage and fate, unquestioned,
Said “All our hopes are in Heaven, but the help of Heaven is granted,
Not in the old miraculous way to astonished idlers:
Heaven helps human help: success is the help of Heaven:
Therefore see that we be on the watch for the help of Heaven.”
Then she portioned the mouldering fish and the withering berries
Laying aside the bones to gnaw—to guard them from madness
When this brutes' fare was devoured. Then forcing the snow from the window

On the side away from the wind, sat down with the Bible opened
At the opening verse of all—“Let us drive off despair with the Scriptures,
Beginning with the beginning, as far death shall allow us.
We shall have time, I trow, to read of what Israel suffered
After their flight from Egypt, and how the Father Almighty
Delivered them out of the desert and brought them safe into Canaan.’
And Dorothy, faint as she was, read verse and verse feebly,—rejoicing,
While Sherwood groaned, and groaned, and prayed “let us forth and drag onward
Till we are weary for rest; then lie in the snowdrift and slumber
The slumber that knows no waking. So death shall fall on us dreaming

We have gained the home we shall never regain—instead of this torture
Slow-drawn on the rack of Starvation.”

But staunch her scarce audible answer.
“Then wife, let us eat the snow and be mad, and have happy ending
In the madman's enchanted palace.”

And again she withheld him, “My husband,
The English meet death with the face, not the back: for the glory of England
Here will we die, we three, two women; and none shall behold it,
Buried for ever from sight and mind in the snows of Acadia.
But we shall have died for England by dying the death of the English.
The glory of England was built by men whom she never heard of,
Who, simple hearts, but knew they were willing to die for England,

And died in their nameless way the death of the English for England.”

Then the feeble man grew strong, like the scared recruit, when he listens
To some brave old tune, for which Britons have marched to their deaths and her glory
On the foughten fields of the world, to the shores cf the uttermost ocean.
And he said “Yes die for England!” and four days long they endured it,
The wind and the snow waxing higher, and the food two days exhausted,
Drinking snow-water and gnawing bones—sustained by the Scriptures.

Now as the fourth day faded the wanderings of Israel were guerdoned
And the Land of Promise was footed, and Jericho's ramparts had fallen.
But slowly these read the good things; for Hunger had won in the battle.
And when the twilight fell, they knew they should never wake, living,
So they piled the logs on the fire that Death might slay only with hunger,
And praying, at first, in faint tones—then unheard—though their lips kept moving,
Farewell: side by side they lay down to die in the darkness.

VI.

Wild raced the winter waves, and a great gale blew from the seaward.
But the coastguard, pacing the fort which stands where the tides of Fundy
And the mighty river wrestle and swirl round the Loyalist city,
Made out a noble ship, that rose from beneath the horizon

Swift as the harvest moon, and waxed and waxed in her splendour.

Nearer and nearer she flew, and tore through the threatening billows
Fourteen knots to the hour. And, seen through his spy-glass, the streamer
Fathoms long, blown out stiff as a sprit from her main-top gallant,
And the beautiful flag at her gaff, that spread like a sail in the tempest,
Told the King's ship; and as closer she charged with her double-reefed topsails
Stretched like a drum, and roaring, and making her creak and tremble,
By the maned and pawed figure-head, he knew the world-famous Sea-lion,
Ere the salute belched forth from her black and white sides to the fortress.

Fearlessly in she flew, the men on the yards undaunted
Furling with lightning speed: and lastly a jib and a trysail
Fell on the deck with a crash, as the anchors ran out from the hawseholes,
And the beautiful frigate stopped and heaved, as a generous race-horse,
Which has won the race of the year by the speed of its beautiful sinews,
Stands a-quiver with foam-flecked sides.

But soon the quick heaving and plunging,
Quietened to rise and sink, and the barge was lowered, and, bounding,
Pulled to the Public Landing, where the Fathers of Canada landed.
Last to step into the barge was one who sat in the stern-sheets,
Bronzed, broad-shouldered and tall, all Hercules now, and no David.
Troublous he seemed, and striding straight to the house of the Mayor,
Asked ‘for one Jonathan Sherwood-late Merchant of New York City,

Parr-Lown grantee.’ But the answer smote cruelly “Jonathan Sherwood
Took up land in the forest a year last summer—not heard of
Since he came down in the early Fall for his stores for the winter,
Settled at Clearwater lake, some forty odd miles in the backwoods,
If indeed living at all, for the Carter who took his provisions,
Six months back in the fall, was, poor as he was, so disheartened
By the poverty, loneliness, awe of the place, that he spent a day over
Urging them back to the town. And the last four days have been cruel,
The cruellest days that the Hazens, the oldest settlers, remember,
The bitterest frost, and the fiercest wind and the longest snowstorm.”
Lester bit his lip through, that no start could be made till the morning.
But the hiring of men and sleighs and the packing of stores for the journey
Took much time, though the Mayor for the famous commander, Lester,
Worked with a will himself and offered the hero sea captain
Rest neath his roof for the night.

At dawn on the morrow morning,
Forth they fared on their journey of toil, with its promise of peril.
There stood a lumber-sleigh with three horses and four stout spademen
And a cariole piled up with sheepskins, the horses in Indian fashion,
One in front of the other. The sleigh had great stores for the journey,
Food for the journey, and food for the Sherwoods, and drugs for the the ailing.
The sleigh led the way to trample the track, the men in their deerskins,
Moccasins, trousers and tunics, caps pulled over ears, and with mittens
Made of skin without fingers for warmth, and with snowshoes slung on their shoulders,

Which soon as they left the city they bound on their feet, and leaping
Forth on the snow, outpaced the sleigh as the hunter in winter
Runs down the Caribou, sunk at each step to its fetlocks or belly.
Lester, equipped like the rest, left the Cariole empty, his spirit
Loved the front of the fight, and he wished to work with his spademen,
Guiding, encouraging, forcing advance at best speed: so they started
Just as the clock struck eight, and by noon were three parts through their journey,
For as Heaven ordained it, the Scotsmen who moved up the river
After the summer-fire, the veteran Forty-Seconds,
Met them hard by the town, with a French train seeking provisions:
And the Clearwater road, three parts, was the road to the Highlanders' village:
Therefore the track was so plain, so clear of drifts, so well trampled,
That sleigh and cariole flew with a merry chime of their sleigh-bells,
The snowshoers darting, like lizards on walls that were ancient ere Cæsar
Sailed to the savage isle, which has filled the Earth with its grandeur
Of humanity, progress and power, and has built up great civilised nations
In continents Rome never dreamed of.

The sleighs and snowshoers glided
Over the pure white snow that rose beside them in ramparts,
Topped with brush like the temple walls in the marvellous cities
Built by a byegone race, and lost ere historical ages
In the forests of Yucatan.

The air was chill as an iceberg,
Glittering as ice, for the storm had passed and the heavens were cloudless.

At noon they halted for food. It was here that the tracks divided,
And theirs was hid in a wall of snow, and 'twas best for the spademen
To work with good hearts and full stomachs.

And then they started in earnest,
The lumber sleigh trampling a road, and the spademen digging out horses
Oft as they sank in the snow; and when they plunged in a snowdrift,
Where a fire had swept the forest and the wind could ravage unhindered,
Tunneling cuttings through. Now the clouds were beginning to darken,
While they were eating their food; and the storm blew up; and the snow fell
Thicker and thicker, the wind, which cut through their coats like an ice blade,
Blinding them with its flurries, and piling the snow; and the men's hearts
Threatened to fail, but Lester leapt forth and reheartened them, working,
One with the strength of three in dragging out sunken horses
And digging through drifts, that rose like hills in the track before them.
Encouragement! orders! threats! and the feats of a giant! but seemed it
Beyond the endurance of man to reach this hut in the forest.
Three leagues yet, and an hour had lapsed and lo! they had traversed
Barely one mile—and the storm was undoing their labour behind them,
Leaving the fight to be fought afresh, if their task was accomplished.
And the winter day died young, and the night grew bitter and wrathful,
And hours scarce sufficed for miles—'twas a miracle sure that the carter
Who took up the stores the to lake, and had come as the lumber-sleighs' driver,
Cunning backwoodsman that he was, should scent the direction.
Only the instinct that leads the horse, unridered in battle,

Home to his barrack afar, and the stolen dog to his master,
Told him the road that night: for the trees were uncut save a stray one
Standing midway in an opening that Nature had left for a roadway;
And the Stars were muffled in storm, and the wheel-ruts lost in the snow-drift;
And strong men began to murmur “we have lost the road! we have passed it!
We have our wives and children! for us too life has its promise.”
But the carter swore “not yet have we traversed the distance, and surely
This is the way.”

And Lester, his great love burning within him,
The love which had been his beacon for ten long years on the waters,
Through all his battles and storms, had pictured the love of his boyhood
Buried alive in a snow-whelmed house with her soft cheeks paling
With terror and harsh, coarse food—the pork and the beans and potatoes,—
And swore that the sleighs should go on; and that he who would forward no further
Must stop in the snow—swift, certain death—and when he, who was loathest
Snatched the reins in an open place from the carter, to turn them,
Seized him with one strong hand, and swung him into the snowdrift,
Twelve good feet from the sleigh, and, drawing a well-primed pistol,
“This” he said “for the next who lays hands on the reins, or the carters.”
So they toiled against hope, and hoped against Fate, until midnight
Slipped past them toiling still, and barely three leagues from their halting,
Though the storm had passed, and the sky was unclouded amethyst darkness
Still they toiled—then joy—for, shading his eye, the ship-captain,

With a glance, that night watches at sea for friends or foes in the darkness,
As perilous one well nigh as the other—descried in the distance,
Spark faintly following spark, and he knew that their quest was accomplished.
Not so his mayhap—for the fearful heart of a lover
Dreams a thousand mishaps that shall wither his joy, as he grasps it.

Even then an hour had well nigh passed ere they reached it,
And tore down the snow from the door, while the mighty heart, that in battle
And peril of reef or storm, faced death like a pastime, was drumming
The trembling ribs of a coward at the stillness of death in the house-hold.

Bolted fast was the door from the weather's wrath, and the summons
Rapped out once, twice, thrice, brought no answer; and batter the door down
None dare on such a night for they knew they should need it thereafter.
Rap on, thunder, Despair! and thunder again! Then listen!
Listen for all your lives, not so much as a shiver to rustle,
Lest ye should miss the stir that tells of the half-aroused sleeper!
Listen! thunder! listen! Ah joy! for a trembling footstep,—
These be weak hands that are too weak for drawing a doorbolt!
Hark! another tremble! Another tremulous footstep—
The creak of a wooden bolt—then bliss—and dread—and a meeting!
An old man swaddled in rags—he had slept in his rags to foster
The spark of vital warmth that starvation and stinting of blankets
Sucked from his veins, a spectre with wild blue eyes, and its features,
The resolute clear cut features of Jonathan Sherwood, crumpled

Out of all shape, and lost in a grizzled-red tangle of eyebrow
Beard and hair matted together—the eye flashing out of the tangle,
Like the eyes of the grizzly bear in the dark, whom the Indian hunter
Braves in his den for the necklace of claws—his Order of Valour.

And see two hollow-cheeked women, one aged ere old, and the other
Shrunk to a shadow of youth, like a seedling drawn up by the sunlight,
Trembling with hunger and terror and cold, and pale as a victim
Waked in a burning garret to find the last stairway has fallen,
But Dorothy, Dorothy living!

A shriek of You—She is lying
Still and dead in his arms. Ah! Lester, undaunted hero
Of a hundred hand-to-hand fights, hast thou courage for this? O Courage,
Strange thy caprices! the man, who trembled in doubt, when the answer,
Coming not, held him in doubt, when he holds her dead, is as steady
As though he were fighting his ship.

“Quick, brandy!” he cries, and unloosens
The strain on her throat, and refuses the snow, which kind hands offer swiftly
To thrust down her back for the shock.

“Nay, bring the chain from the waggon
The chain is cold as the snow, and wets not.”

The freezing iron
Burning the warmth of her spine, the scorch in her throat from the brandy
Open the faint blue eyes—she lives, thank Heaven! and tenders
Feeble hands to her lover. Meanwhile her father and mother

Sat like corpses themselves, stunned prey in the fangs of starvation.
Seeing Jonathan Sherwood, sleek, purse-proud, satisfied merchant,
Ten years ago, could a poet dream such an irony? Look you,
The Sherwoods starving in rags in a peasant's hut in the forest,
The threshold half filled with snow, and by the light of a sleigh-lamp,
Wild men, muffled in skins, reviving their worshipped daughter
And they too listless or feeble to stir?

But Dorothy, called back,
Clasped in the arms of her lover and kissed, and kissed, but so gently
Lest he should bruise the frail life, as a child with too eager fingers
Crushes the beautiful moth, which he covets, and catches triumphant,
Dorothy, felt the flood of life surging up in the channels,
Late like low-tide in Fundy, and leaning on Lester besought him,
“Save my father and mother, or Hunger will slay them ere morning.”

Lester, ten years beloved by sieged soldiers and castaway sailors,
Came with his remedies ready. Meanwhile, without, the two carters
Had loosed the teams from the sleighs that the horses' animal instinct
Might be free to save them alive, till they threw up a shelter.

The horses
Followed them loose to the wood, where sharp axes and skilful woodsmen
Swiftly made screens of boughs, with the natural screen of the forest,
Sufficient to keep them alive, while their masters tramped back to the cabin,
And, dragging their stores inside, fast bolted the door on the weather,
Finding the fire replenished, and the starved folk feeding by inches,

And their fellows eating like giants, [they had none of them eaten since noonday,
Fifteen hours well nigh: so long had three leagues with the snowdrifts
Fought their advance.]

All night they rested, and slept like sailors
Three days and nights in a storm, each man with each muscle defending
The ship against wind and wave, when they reach their desired haven.
The sun shone brightly in, ere they woke, and found a blue heaven
And the wind calmed down to a breeze. Then breaking their fast, the three saved ones
[Saved from themselves, as it seemed by cruelty, Lester restraining,
With a doctor's inflexible will, the wolves which clamoured within them
For food, food, food;] apportioned their doses of liquid,
And the sturdy, skin-clad woodsmen, once more, devouring like giants.

They tramped to the shelter and saw their horses sound: and reharnessed.
Nought but their stores they took, then making all fast from the weather
Packed the sleighs, the old folks in the woodsleigh, rolled up in sheepskins,
Well watched by the valiant and kindly though rudely-visaged backwoodsmen,
Lester with Dorothy, back in the cariole, tenderly watching,
But ready if danger threatened to spring to the front, or if need were
To outstrive all in the snow, though anxious in every free moment
To watch the beloved one and baffle the cold with a hundred devices.

Ere he had wrapped her to bear to the sleigh, he had held her at hands-stretch,

With her wan cheeks wild-rosed with love, and the hair, which fingers enfeebled
Dreaded to dress, hanging down—an arms length of tangled sunshine,
In waves on sweet neck and sweet brow, and shrouding the tender glances
Surrendered by timid blue eyes. It fell on the garments of buckskin,
Daintily fashioned, embroidered with quills in the patterns most honoured,
All choice skins, craftily tanned, and supple as French queen's gauntlets,
Wrought by the deftest squaws, and brought for the gentle and lovely
By the pitying sons of the forest, beholding the tattery vesture
Which the storms of the driving Fall beat through like dead leaves on the Maples.
Tunic and huntress's skirt, fringed leggings and moccasins brought they,
The daintiest each of their kind, the moccasins matched to the slight foot
From its delicate print in the sand by the mouth of the brook, where she sported
In the happy summer days through the limpid pools of the shallows.
Graceful the moccasined feet, bound closely at instep and ankle
For warmth, as when stockinged in lace in their exquisite satin slippers
They half hovered, half danced in the minuet with a fairy's flower-lightness.
So thought Lester that morn, and the soft free robes of the red men
Showed the soft grace of her slender shape, as he whispered, more truly
Than the costliest clinging silken dress she had worn in a ball-room.
The child of the forest was his. Before her father and tyrant
She had flung herself in his arms—had been kissed to life, and had hailed him
As You, the one You in the world.

How tenderly back in the cariole,
Under the sheepskin apron thrown over them both, he had wrapped her
In the softest and thickest skins, and chafed her hands and revived her
With sips and sips of broth, from a phial thrust in his bosom—
The only warmth that defied the frost.

Oh! The way it was weary,
Weary to Jonathan Sherwood, his wife, and the staunch backwoodsmen.
For the snow in the night had drifted deep in the breaks of the forest
Making toil for the wooden shovels, or they had to dig out the horses,
For the newfallen snow was soft, and the track they had made half-buried.
But to Lester the three leagues flew like racing, and ere he remembered
They were striking the Scotsmen's road by the mighty Acadian river.
They halted: for four hours fast, and the cold, made hunger imperious,
And the road was so heavily drifted, and dead wood was handy for firing,
Needed to thaw their food: and they ate, after throwing their sheepskins
Over the horses, their saviours, to keep them alive while they halted.
But the drifts rose hillock-high, for this was the end of the forest,
Since the river in years gone by had run through a lake, and vast meadows
Held its dried bosom with hardly a tree, and the shovellers shuddered:—
Well-nigh ten leagues to be traversed! and three, when they all were fresher,
Had cost them fifteen hours, and Lester, the hardiest toiler,
Having no doubt in his mighty heart of the sledges' safe-homing,
Doubted yet if the Sherwoods, the old above all, though his heart beat
Loudest for her he loved, could endure the endless exposure
Of a second day out in the cold; and, inspired by his heart, ascended

With swift sailor feet a pine; when lo! before him the river,
The fair, lake-bosomed St. John; and he knew that the snow there was shallow,
For where the ice was packed, it peaked through the crust, and where eddies
Kept the swirled waters unfrozen, the wall of snow round the edges
Rose so low: then he clambered down, and, hailing the carters,
Asked if they dared the river with its perils of uniced currents,
Oft roofed over with snow—sure death to all whom the trap caught.
And both, with accord, cried “Yes,” and the shovellers, working like firemen,
Cleft them a path to the river, and out with a cheer, half defiance,
And a cracking of whips, they leapt on the ice and swept to the seaward
Racing, over the ice, as it seemed, after battling the snowdrifts.
And on and on they dashed, the ice oft cracking beneath them,
When it arched over broken water; and the packed ice ready to fling them
Out on this side or that, as the hurrying runners struck it.
And last, when the dusk had deepened, they heard a low faraway thunder,
Like the rush of a mighty fall, and they knew they were nearing that portent,
That dragon's lair with its walls of rock and its rock-ridge threshold,
Over which twice in the day falls the flood of the sea on the river,
And twice in the day the river flings pent-up ebb on the ocean,
Leaping the sea on the river and the river back on the sea-arm
Thrice the height of a man, in a black implacable whirlpool,
With fountains of flying foam, which float down and fill up the harbour,
Where the mightiest fleet in the world could range in, engaging another.

The sailor heard it first, with his senses sharpened by danger,

And shouted loud to the carters, who dashed to the bank in horror,
The ice loud-cracking beneath.

The wood sleigh landed in safety,
But the cariole, coming behind, was caught, as the ice sank slowly,
When Lester with one wild leap had landed, and, seizing the horseheads,
Forced with his mighty strength the strength of the horses, who clambered,
With straining shoulder and leg, and the cariole safe behind them.

Soon they found the road, well-tramped, for the sleighs of the city
Had raced with the well-to-do forth, thus far and farther, to witness
The giants' deeds of the storm, and soon they were clattering bravely
Over the forest of Portland and into the streets of the city
Up to the principal inn, where the bustle of sledges unloading
And the spoken-out words of applause drew a concourse of citizens quickly.

Once in the inn, the old folks were straight in their beds and physicianed.
But Dorothy sat by the fire in the inn-keeper's parlour, blushing
Half for her Indian robes and half for her sailor lover,
Standing out there in the hall making glad the rescuers party
With largess of foreign gold; for while England was fighting together
Her Colonists, French and Dutch and Swedes and Spaniards and Russians,
There was many a prize afloat at sea for adventurous seamen,
And Lester, a proverb for daring, in brig, then corvette, then frigate
Had captured and captured and captured right under the enemy's fort-guns
Till he was rich. And when peace was declared, he had sent in his papers,

Soon as his ship was paid off last summer, and taken his passage,
Straight for New York, where the Sherwoods, staunch Whigs were enjoying their triumph.
Judge of his grief when he found them proscribed, and in frozen Acadia!

His Majesty's Frigate Sea-lion, the ship which had borne him from England,
Carried him down to St. John, to miss them, but, thanks be to Heaven,
Dorothy, safe at last, was awaiting the arms of her lover
Blushing and smiling with happy tears. The long cold journey
Had fled like a dream of delight—the cold had no mastery—stronger
And stronger each minute she grew, and between the pulled over frost-cap
And the great cloak-collar turned up, two tender eyes had been sparkling,
A pleading mouth told its mute tale, the pale face reflowered with pleasure,
And a golden tress escaped as she hung on the words of her lover.

No need here to recount the bliss of the lovers, how Lester
Won her to tell her love, and told his, and told her his story,
How, when he left her that night, he had gone to the friendly commander
Of the King's ship moored in the river, and entered as clerk—of the action
Where the officers all were killed, and he carried her safe into Portsmouth,
Earning the thanks, of the King and a junior-lieutenant's commission;
How he had fought and fought and fought to the rank of post-captain,
Capturing prize after prize, and fighting some score of sea battles,
All through the seven years war with the Colonies leagued to all Europe;
And, after the war, had resigned and been granted his passage, gladly,

In his majesty's Frigate Sea-lion, “for New York with despatches for Congress.”
Nor to tell of his goodly mansion, and his hospitality famous;
And the noble ships he built in the yards of St. John, from the lumber
The lordly river swept down, and the ports in the Indies they sailed to,
And the wondrous wares they brought,—nor the manor house at Clearwater
Built on to the old log cabin, where Lester every summer
Brought his fair wife, unchanged, with an ever-increasing quiver,
To swim and paddle and fill little cheeks with the country's roses.

Nor to tell how Jonathan Sherwood, by the sale of cruel Clearwater,
Built, on his Parr-town lot, a pleasant cottage, contented,
After his former splendour and his latter straits, with existence
Secure from starvation and cold, and with fellow creatures to talk to,
And striving in to vain fathom the depth of the infinite goodness
Of that great heart he had scorned with a daughter's prayer—which forgave him,
And, in his hour of despair brought him life and love and fortune.