young gentleman 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 the
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, which was to her even as fairyland; often would her plaintive
ballads and old tales, related in the hut or the wigwam to her attentive
auditors, wile away heavy thoughts; Louis and Mathilde, her cousins,
sometimes wondered how Catharine had acquired such a store of ballads and
wild tales as she could tell.

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 enchroma, or painted-cup; the
large pure white blossoms of the lily-like trillium; the delicate and
fragile lilac geranium, whose graceful flowers woo the hand of the
flower-gatherer only to fade almost within his grasp; the golden
cyprepedium, or mocassin flower, so singular, so lovely in its colour and