Thus Sylvanus Cobb learned his lesson in the College of the Silences, to the accompaniment of the hard clang of the logs roaring down the mountain-side, or the sweeter and more continuous ring of his men’s axes.  At night he walked about a long time, silent under the thick-spangled roofing of stars.  For in that land the black midnight sky is not thin-sprinkled with glistening pointlets as at home, but wears a very cloth of gold.  The frost shrewdly nipped his ears, and he heard the musical sound of the water running somewhere under the ice.  A poor hare ran to his feet, pursued by a fox which drew off at sight of him, showing an ugly flash of white teeth.

But all the while, among his quietness of thought, and even in the hours when he went indoors to read to the men as they sat on their rugs with their feet to the fire, he thought oftenest of the walks on the North Berwick sands, and of the important fact that May Chisholm had to stop three times to push a rebellious wisp of ringlets under her hat-brim.  Strange are the workings of the heart of a man, and there is generally a woman somewhere who pulls the strings.

Euroclydon laid his axe-handle on the leaves of his Hebrew Bible to keep them from turning in the brisk airs which the late Canadian spring brought into the long log-hut, loosening the moss in its crevices.  The scent of seaweed on a far-away beach came to him, and a longing to go back possessed him.  He queried within himself if it were possible that he could ever settle down to the common quiet of a Scottish parish, and decided that, under certain conditions, the quiet might be far from commonplace.  So he threw his bundle over his shoulder, when the camp broke up in the beginning of May, and took the first steamer home.

His first visit was to North Berwick, and there on the sands between the East Terrace and the island promontory which looks towards the Bass, where the salt water lies in the pools and the sea-pinks grow between them, he found May Chisholm walking with a young man.  Sylvanus Cobb looked the young man over.  He had a pretty moustache but a weak mouth.

“I can best that fellow, if I have a red head!” said Sylvanus, with some of the old Euroclydon fervour.

And he did.  Whether it was the red head, of which each individual hair stood up automatically, the clear blue eyes, which were the first thing and sometimes the only thing that most women saw in his face, or the shoulders squared with the axe, that did it, May Chisholm only knows.  You can ask her, if you like.  But most likely it was his plain, determined way of asking for what he wanted—­an excellent thing with women.  But, any way, it is a fact that, before eighteen months had gone by, Sylvanus Cobb was settled in the western midlands of Scotland, with the wife whose tangles of hair were only a trifle less distracting than they used to be between the East Cliff and Tantallon.  And this is a true tale.