Magarth's boys with them. 'Tis the only outing they get,' explained Magarth, who was surprised on Archie's preparing to return to his shanty, for he expected he would stay till evening. Not wishing to be beholden too much to his kind friend, he shouldered what supplies he had bought the night before and started. Among the supplies was a hoe and a bag of potatoes to plant amid the stumps. The routine of his daily life was monotonous--up with the sun to attack the trees which stood between him and a livelihood. It was lonely but he never grew despondent. Singing, whistling, shouting, he kept at his work. Two of the songs of Burns were his favorites--a Man's a Man for a' that and Scots wha hae. On coming to the line, Liberty with every blow, he drove his ax into the tree with vim, and, indeed, the trees at that time were the enemies he had to fight. Saturdays he went to Magarth's to do what writing he might have, for his daughter was in no hurry to leave Toronto. Each Monday found Archie more handy with the ax, and neither heat nor mosquitoes caused him to slacken in extending his clearance. Wet days alone made him take rest in his shanty, in a corner of which was his bed of hemlock boughs and fern leaves. When summer waned and the nights grew cold the lack of a chimney in his shanty made living in it intolerable, for the smoke circulated round until it found the hole in the roof intended for its escape. He thought over plans to get a chimney, but could hit on none that he could carry out without some one to help him. From time to time he had burnings of brush-heaps, storing the ashes in a hole he had dug in the side of a hillock and covering them with big sheets of bark to keep them dry. The end of September, on making his customary visit to Magarth's, he found a letter waiting for him. It was from his sister, who expressed the delight they felt on hearing of his having got a farm and built a house, and how his letter, like the one he had mailed from Montreal, had passed from house to house until everybody in the parish had read them, and they had raised quite a 'furore' about Canada and of emigration to its woods, for the acquisition of farms of their own dazzled all. Father and mother were well and were kept in good spirits by anticipating the day when they would be able to join him in his fine house. He read the letter a hundred times and vowed anew he would not turn aside until those it came from were beside him.