“I mean, the living is rough, and all that; and of course” (this was added with suspicious caution) “it wouldn’t be worth my while to pay the same wages to an inexperienced hand.”

Trenholme laughed.  This reception was slightly different from what he had anticipated.  He remarked that he might be taken a week on trial, and to this Bates agreed, not without some further hesitation.  Trenholme inquired after the health of the old aunt of whom he had heard.

“In bodily health,” said Bates, “she is well.  You may perhaps have heard that in mind she has failed somewhat.”

The man’s reserve was his dignity, and it produced its result, although obvious dignity of appearance and manner was entirely lacking to him.

The toothless, childish old man woman Trenholme encountered when he entered the house struck him as an odd exaggeration of the report he had just received.  He did not feel at home when he sat down to eat the food Bates set before him; he perceived that it was chiefly because in a new country hospitality is considered indispensable to an easy conscience that he had received any show of welcome.

Yet the lank brown hand that set his mug beside him shook so that some tea was spilt.  Bates was in as dire need of the man he received so unwillingly as ever man was in need of his fellow-man.  It is when the fetter of solitude has begun to eat into a man’s flesh that he begins to proclaim his indifference to it, and the human mind is never in such need of companionship as when it shuns companions.

The two spent most of the evening endeavouring to restore to liveliness the birds that Trenholme had taken from his pockets, and in discussing them.  Bates produced a very old copy of a Halifax newspaper which contained a sonnet to this bird, in which the local poet addressed it as

   “The Sunset-tinted grosbeak of the north”

Trenholme marvelled at his resources.  Such newspapers as he stored up were kept under the cushion of the old aunt’s armchair.

Bates brought out some frozen cranberries for the birds.  They made a rough coop and settled them in it outside, in lee of one of the sheds.  It is extraordinary how much time and trouble people will expend on such small matters if they just take it into their heads to do it.

CHAPTER IV.

There was no very valuable timber on Bates’s land.  The romance of the lumber trade had already passed from this part of the country, but the farmers still spent their winters in getting out spruce logs, which were sold at the nearest saw-mills.  Bates and Cameron had possessed themselves of a large portion of the hill on which they had settled, with a view to making money by the trees in this way—­money that was necessary to the household, frugal as it was, for, so far, all their gains had been spent in necessary improvements.  Theirs had been a far-seeing policy that would in the end have brought prosperity, had the years of uninterrupted toil on which they calculated been realised.