lifted her head and tried to look sprightly, but she was so worn with hard work and much dyspepsia that the attempt was rather a failure.

Reggie looked disappointed. If the festivity were not a wedding or a funeral, he did not see what it could be. No church functions were in progress this month, for the parson was away on holiday, and it would not have been considered in good taste to have a church frolic in his absence.

Galena’s eyes sparkled. She was aching for someone to talk things over with. The men were always in a hurry when they came in from the field, and there was not another woman within half a mile of the place. She hesitated, and was lost.

“We are going to have a great frolic to-night; it was only decided late last night, that is why I am so driven with cooking this morning. We are going to have a big surprise party at old Wrack Peveril’s; you know where he lives⁠—⁠over the Ridge at Ripple. They say he is a most fearfully disagreeable old man. He lives quite alone, and has done so for more years than you have been alive. I have heard he made a vow that no woman should enter his house, on account of his only daughter having run away from him to get married. Don’t you expect it will make him sit up when all the lot of us go walking in?”

“Suppose he won’t let you inside the door?” Reggie stared at her with bulging eyes. He was thinking of what had happened at his own poor home two winters before, when he and Mose had gone to bed, and had been hounded out of it by a surprise party that threatened to pull the shingles off the roof if they were not admitted. Mose had been furious at the invasion, for the cupboard was empty, and the stark poverty of the home had been all laid bare to the laughing, careless crowd who had taken the place by storm.

“Suppose he can’t keep us out!” she mocked. “I just love surprise parties when there is a spice of mischief in them. When we go to parson’s and take more food than we could eat in a month, and leave it all behind for him and Mrs. White, it is most as tame as going to church on Sunday, or having a missionary meeting and giving money to convert the heathen; but when we go to surprise someone who does not want to see us, why, that is where the fun begins.”

Reggie nodded in token of understanding, but he was spared the necessity of reply by the entrance of Nathan Gittins, the eldest brother of Galena, who ran the farm and the saw-mill, all the four brothers in between having left New Brunswick for the Far West when they 

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