Chapter 23

SILVER SLEIGH-BELLS.

The shanty was ere long lined in a comely manner with the planks which had journeyed up the pond in the ice-boat, affording many an evening's work for Arthur. About Christmas all was right and tight.

Now, to those who have any regrets or sadnesses in the background of memory, the painfullest of all times are these anniversaries. One is forced round face to face with the past and the unalterable, to gaze on it, perchance, through blinding tears. The days return--unchanged: but, oh, to what changed hearts!

Were they not thinking of the Canadian exiles to-day, at home, at dear old Dunore? For nothing better than exiles did the young men feel themselves, this snow-white Christmas morning, in the log-hut among the backwoods, without a friendly face to smile a greeting, except poor Andy's; and his was regretful and wistful enough too.

'I say, Bob, what shall we do with ourselves? I'm sure I wish I didn't know 'twas Christmas day at all. It makes a fellow feel queer and nonsensical--homesick, I suppose they call it--and all that sort of thing. I vote we obliterate the fact, by chopping as hard as any other day.'

So, after reading the chapters for the day (how the words brought up a picture of the wee country church in Ireland, with its congregation of a dozen, its whitewashed walls and blindless lancet windows!), they went forth to try that relief for all pains of memory--steady hard work. The ten acres allotted for December were nearly chopped through by this time, opening a considerable space in front of the shanty, and beginning to reveal the fair landscape of lake and wooded slopes that lay beyond. The felled trees lay piled in wind rows and plan heaps so far as was possible without the help of oxen to move the huge logs; snow covered them pretty deeply, smoothing all unsightliness for the present.

'How I long to have something done towards the building of our house!' said Robert, pausing after the fall of a hemlock spruce, while Arthur attacked the upper branches. 'I'd like so much to have it neatly finished before my father and mother and Linda come next summer.'

'Well, haven't you no end of shingles made for the roof?' said the other, balancing his axe for a blow. 'You're working at them perpetually; and Andy isn't a bad hand either at wooden slates, as he calls them.'

'We must have a raising-bee in spring,' concluded Robert, after some rumination--'as soon as the snow melts a little. Really, only for such co-operative working in this thinly peopled country, nothing large could be ever effected. Bees were a great device, whoever invented them.'

'By the way,' said Arthur presently, returning from chopping apart the trunk into two lengths of fifteen feet, 'did you hear that the Scotchman between us and the "Corner," at Daisy Burn, wants to sell his farm and improvements, and is pushing out into the wild land farther up the pond? Nim told me yesterday. He expects three pounds sterling an acre, including fixtures, and he got the ground for nothing; so that's doubling one's capital, I imagine.'

'How for nothing?'

'It was before a human being had settled in these townships, and the concession lines were only just blazed off by the surveyors. Davidson obtained a grant of land on condition of performing what are called settlement duties, which means chopping out and clearing the concession lines for a certain distance. Of course that was another way of payment, by labour instead of cash. But on swearing that it was done, he obtained what Nim calls a "lift," a crown patent, we should say, and the land was his estate for ever.'

'I wish we could transfer a couple of his fenced fields here,' said Robert, 'and his young orchard. We must have some sort of a garden, Arthur, before Linda comes.'

'Yes, she never could get on without her flower beds. I say, Bob, won't Cedar Creek look awfully wild to them?'

They worked on awhile both thinking of that. Any one accustomed to smooth enclosed countries, with regular roads and houses at short distances, would indeed find the backwoods 'awfully wild.' And that most gentle mother, how would she bear the transplanting?

'I had a very misty idea of what bush-life was, I own, till I found myself in it,' quoth Robert, after a long silence, broken only by the ring of the axes.

'Living like a labourer at home, but without half his comforts,' said Arthur, piling the boughs. 'Tell you what, Bob, we wouldn't be seen doing the things we do here. Suppose Sir Richard Lacy or Lord Scutcheon saw us in our present trim?'

'But you know that's all false pride,' said Robert, with a little glow on his cheek nevertheless. 'We shouldn't be ashamed of anything but wrong.'

'Say what you will, Bob, it strikes me that we aren't of the class which do best in Canada. The men of hard hands, labouring men and women, are those who will conquer the forest and gain wealth here.'

'Well, if that be the rule, you and I must strive to be the exception,' said Robert; 'for I'm determined to have a comfortable homestead for the dear old people from Dunore, and I'm equally determined to set my mark on Canadian soil, and to prosper, if it be God's will.'

He lifted off his cap for a moment, looking at the serene sky. The rising discontent in his brother's heart was stilled by the gesture. Both worked assiduously, till Andy, with an unusual twinkle in his eyes, summoned them to dinner.

'What has the fellow been about, I wonder? I know 'twasn't respect for the holiday kept him indoors all the morning.'

It was presently explained. Andy, ignorant of courses, dished up, together with the ham, a very fine dumpling emitting the odour of apples.

'Sure, as ye can't have yer own plum puddin' in this outlandish counthry, ye can have a thing the same shape, anyhow. Mrs. Jackey showed me how to make it iligant, of the string of dried bits I had thrun in the box since we kem here first. Throth an' I'm cur'ous to see did they ever swell out agin, afther the parchin' they got.'

But for a slightly peculiar taste in the sweet, the dumpling was unimpeachable.

'I suppose Mrs. Jackey uses maple sugar in her confectionery,' said Robert; 'a _soupçon_ of trees runs through it.'

Late in the evening, as the pitch-pine logs were flaring abundance of light through the cabin--light upon Robert at his shingles, and upon Arthur at his work-bench, and upon Andy shaving and packing the slips of white pine as fast as his master split them, with a stinging night outside, some twenty-five degrees below zero, and the snow crusted at top hard enough to bear anything--all three raised their heads to listen to some approaching sound through the dead silence of the frozen air. It was a very distant vagrant tinkling, as of sheep-bells on a common in old Europe; they looked at one another, and Andy crossed himself reverently.

'Like chapel bells over the say from poor Ireland,' he muttered, and crept to the door, which Robert had opened. 'Sure there isn't fairies all the ways out here? an' 'tis mighty like it'--

'Hush--h--!' Andy crossed himself again as the tinkling became more plainly audible. A sweetly plaintive jangling it seemed--a tangled careless music. Nearer, and still nearer it came.

'What a fool I am!' exclaimed Robert; 'it must be sleigh-bells. Travellers, I suppose.'

And before many minutes were past, the sleigh had rounded its way among the stumps, over the smooth snow, to the shanty door, filled with brilliant wood-light.