their faces. In the distance the smouldering storm rumbled and flashed.

"All religious folks believe that," continued the speaker, a little
scornfully, "and the Advents think it'll be now; but old Cameron we've
had in Chellaston for a year, he tells them it'll be to-night."

Alec Trenholme had by this time received his brother's letters. "A
year!" interrupted he almost fiercely. "Didn't he come in January?"

The narrator drew in the horns of his exaggeration. "D'ye know all about
him, for there's no use telling if you do?"

"I only thought you might be talking about an old man heard went there
then."

"He a'most died, or did really, somewhere below Quebec; and then he got
up and preached and prayed, and his folks wouldn't keep him, so he
wandered everywhere, and a kind young man we have at our place took him
in and keeps him. When he was in the other world he heard the Judgment
would happen to-night. Would that be the same man you know?"

"It will be the same man."

"Did you know his people?" asked the other curiously.

But Alec had no thought of being questioned. He brought the speaker back
to his place as historian, and he, nothing loth, told of the intended
meeting on the mountain, and of the white ascension robes, in his
ignorant, blatant fashion, laying bare the whole pathetic absurdity of
it.