Shenacs Work at Home | Page 3

there were sorrow and bitter
anger in the heart of Angus Dhu when he came to know that his son
had also gone away. He was not a man of many words, and he said
little to anyone about his son; but in his heart he believed that he had
been beguiled away by the son of Angus Bhan, and bitter resentment
rose within him at the thought.
A few months passed away, and there came a letter from Allister,
written soon after his arrival in California. His cousin Evan Dhu was
with him. They had done nothing to earn money as yet, but they were
in high spirits, and full of hope that they would do great things. This
letter gave much comfort to them all; but it was a long time before they
heard from the wanderers again.
In the meantime the affairs of Angus Bhan did not grow more
prosperous. It became more and more difficult for him to pay the
interest of his debt; and though his cousin seldom alluded in words to
his obligation, he knew quite well that he would not abate a penny
either of principal or interest when the time of payment came.
A year passed away. No more letters came from Allister, and his
father's courage grew fainter and fainter. There seemed little hope of
his ever being able to pay his debt; and so, when Angus Dhu asked him
to sell a part of his farm to him, he went home with a heavy heart to
consult his wife about it. They agreed that something must be done at
once; and so it was arranged that if Allister was not heard from, or if
some other means of paying at least the interest did not offer before the
spring, the hundred acres of their land that lay next to the farm of
Angus Dhu should be given up to him. It was sad enough to have to do
this; but Angus Bhan said to his wife,--
"If anything were to happen to me, you and the children would be far
better with half the land free from debt, than with all burdened as it
must be till Allister comes home."
They did not say much to each other, but their hearts were very sore--

his, that he must give up the land left to him by his father; hers, for his
sake, and also for the sake of her first-born son, a wanderer far away.
That autumn, when the harvest was over, the second son, Lewis, set off
with some young men of the place to join a company of lumberers, who
were, as is their custom, to pass the winter in the woods. It was a time
of great prosperity with lumber-merchants then, and good wages could
be earned in their service. There was nothing to be done at home in the
winter which his father, with the help of the younger children, could
not do; and Lewis, who was eighteen, was eager to earn money to help
at home, and eager also to enter into the new and, as he thought, the
merry life in the woods. So Lewis went away, and there were left at
home Hamish and Shenac, who were twins, Dan, Hugh, Colin, and
little Flora, the youngest and dearest of them all. The anxieties of the
parents were not suffered to sadden the lives of the children, and the
little MacIvors Bhan were as merry young people as one could wish to
see.
Though they were not so prosperous, they were a far happier household
than the MacIvors Dhu. There was the same number of children in each
family; but Angus Dhu's children were most of them older than their
cousins, and while Angus Bhan had six sons and two daughters, Angus
Dhu had six daughters and two sons. "His cousin should have been a
far richer man than he, with so many sons," Angus Dhu used to say
grimly. But three of the boys of Angus Bhan were only children still,
and one of them was a cripple. And as for the daughters of Angus Dhu,
they had been as good as sons even for the farm-work, labouring in the
fields, as is the custom for young women in this part of the country, as
industriously and as efficiently as men--far more so, indeed, than their
own brother Evan did; for he was often impatient of the closeness with
which his father kept them all at work, and it was this, quite as much as
his love of adventure and his wish to see the world, that made him go
away at last. The two eldest daughters were married, and the third was
living away from home; so, after Evan left, there were four