by

J. CAWDOR BELL.




CHAPTER I.

The Friends--The Knapsacks--The Queen's Wharf--The Northern
Railway--Belle Ewart--The _Susan Thomas_, Captain and Crew--Musical
Performance--The Sly Dog--Misunderstanding--Kempenfeldt Bay.


Eugene Coristine and Farquhar Wilkinson were youngish bachelors and
fellow members of the Victoria and Albert Literary Society. Thither, on
Wednesday evenings, when respectable church-members were wending their
way to weekly service, they hastened regularly, to meet with a band of
like-minded young men, and spend a literary hour or two. In various
degrees of fluency they debated the questions of the day; they read
essays with a wide range of style and topic; they gave readings from
popular authors, and contributed airy creations in prose and in verse to
the Society's manuscript magazine. Wilkinson, the older and more sedate
of the two, who wore a tightly-buttoned blue frock coat and an eyeglass,
was a schoolmaster, pretty well up in the Toronto Public Schools.
Coristine was a lawyer in full practice, but his name did not appear on
the card of the firm which profited by his services. He was taller than
his friend, more jauntily dressed, and was of a more mercurial
temperament than the schoolmaster, for whom, however, he entertained a