Shenacs Work at Home | Page 5

body of one had been recovered: it was the body of Lewis MacIvor.
"We should be thankful that we can at least bring him home," said
Angus Bhan to his wife, while she made preparations for his sad
journey. But he said it with very pale, trembling lips, and his wife
struggled to restrain the great burst of weeping that threatened to have

way, that he might have the comfort of thinking that she was bearing
her trouble well. But when she was left alone all these sad days of
waiting, she was ready to say, in the bitterness of her heart, that there
was no sorrow like her sorrow. One son was a wanderer, another was
dead, and on the face of the dearly-beloved Hamish was settling the
look of habitual suffering, so painful to see. Her cup of sorrow was full
to the brim, she declared, but she knew not what she said.
For, when a few days had passed, there were brought home for burial
two dead bodies instead of one. Her husband was no more. He had
nearly accomplished his sorrowful errand, when death overtook him.
He had complained to the friend who was with him of feeling cold, and
had left the sleigh to walk a mile or two to warm himself. They waited
in vain for him at the next resting-place, and when they went back to
look for him they found him lying with his face in the snow, quite dead.
He had not died from cold, the doctor said, but from heart-disease, and
probably without suffering; and this comfort the bereaved widow tried
to take to herself.
But her cup of sorrow was not full yet. The very night before the burial
was to be, the house caught fire and burned to the ground. It was with
difficulty that the few neighbours who gathered in time to help could
save the closed coffins from the flames; and it seemed a small matter,
at the time, that nearly all their household stuff was lost.
The mother's cup did seem full now. I do not think that the coming of
any trouble, however great, could at this time have added to her grief.
She had striven to be submissive under the repeated strokes that had
fallen upon her, but the horrors of that night were too much for her,
weakened as she was by sorrow. For a time she was quite distracted,
heeding little the kind efforts of her neighbours to alleviate her distress
and the distress of her children. All that kind hearts and willing hands
could do was done for them. The log house which their grandfather had
built still stood. It was repaired, and filled with gifts from every family
in the neighbourhood, and the widow and her children found refuge
there.
"Oh, what a sad beginning for a story!" I think some of my young

readers may say, in tones of disappointment. It is indeed a sad
beginning, but every sorrowful word is true. Every day there are just
such sorrowful events happening in the world, though it is not often
that trouble falls so heavily at once on any household. I might have left
all this out of my story; but then no one could have understood so well
the nature of the work that fell to Shenac, or have known the
difficulties she had to overcome in trying to do it well.
CHAPTER TWO.
It was May-day. Oftentimes in the northern country this month is
ushered in by drizzling rain, or even by the falling snow; but this year
brought a May-day worthy of the name--clear, mild, and balmy. There
was not a cloud in all the sky, nor wind enough to stir the catkins
hanging close over the waters of the creek. The last days of April had
been warm and bright, and there was a tender green on the low-lying
fields, and on the poplars that fringed the wood; and the boughs of the
maple-trees in the sugar-bush looked purple and brown over the great
grey trunks.
There is never a May-day when some flowers cannot be found beneath
these trees, and in the warm hollows along the margin of the creek; but
this year there were more than a few. Besides the pale little "spring
flower," which hardly waits for the snow to go away before it shows
itself, there were daffodils and anemones and wake-robins, and from
the lapful which little Flora MacIvor sat holding on the bank close
beside the great willow peeped forth violets, blue and white. There
were lady-slippers too somewhere not far away, Flora was sure, if only
Dan or Hughie could be persuaded to look for them a little farther down
the creek, in the damp ground under the cedars, where