recommended its daily perusal to Duncan. Had the gift been a Bible,
perhaps the soldier's obedience to his priest might have rendered it a
dead letter to him; but as it fortunately happened, he was unconscious
of any prohibition to deter him from becoming acquainted with the
truths of the gospel. He communicated the power of perusing his books
to his children Hector and Catharine, Duncan and Kenneth, in
succession, with a feeling of intense reverence; even the labour of
teaching was regarded as a holy duty in itself, and was not undertaken
without deeply impressing the obligation he was conferring upon them
whenever they were brought to the task. It was indeed a precious boon,
and the children learned to consider it as a pearl beyond all price in
the trials that awaited them in their eventful career. To her
knowledge of religious truths young Catharine added an intimate
acquaintance with the songs and legends of her father's romantic
country; often would her plaintive ballads and old tales, related in
the hut or the wigwam to her attentive auditors, wile away heavy
thoughts.

It was a lovely sunny day in the flowery month of June. Canada had not
only doffed that "dazzling white robe" mentioned in the songs of her
Jacobite emigrants, but had assumed the beauties of her loveliest
season; the last week in May and the first three of June being
parallel to the English May, full of buds and flowers and fair promise
of ripening fruits.

The high sloping hills surrounding the fertile vale of Cold Springs
were clothed with the blossoms of the gorgeous scarlet castilegia
coccinea, or painted-cup; the large, pure, white blossoms of the
lily-like trillium grandiflorum; the delicate and fragile lilac
geranium, whose graceful flowers woo the hand of the flower-gatherer