The chase did not last long; the prey, exhausted, fled out of doors and the master subsided into a chair. He brought the school to some semblance of order and made a feeble attempt at teaching. But by the afternoon he was uproariously genial. He spent an hour conducting a competition in which the boy who could stand longest on the hot stove received the highest marks, and finally went to sleep with his feet on the desk and his red handkerchief spread over his face. But the affair was not without material benefit to Scotty. In his gallant refutation of the charge against him, and in the miraculous way he had averted the master's vengeance, he had won a place in the heart of every MacDonald. Thereafter, no one outside the clan dared give him his English name, and at last the fact that he possessed one almost faded from his friends', as well as his own, mind. IV "CAPE CANADA" The ocean bursts in very wrath, The waters rush and whirl As the hardy diver cleaves a path Down to the treasured pearl. --GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE. The days sped swiftly, and Scotty learned many things both in and out of school. In the latter department his chief instructor was his nearest neighbour. Peter Lauchie was fourteen, and a wonderful man of the world in Scotty's eyes; but in spite of the great disparity of years the two were much together. From his companion Scotty learned many great lessons. The first and cardinal principle laid down was that all who hailed from the Oa must wage internecine war upon the Flats and must despise and ignore all English and Lowlanders. Another was that one might as well make up one's mind to attend to business during McAllister's glacial period, but that, when a more genial atmosphere pervaded the school, the farther one went in inventing new forms of mischief the more likely was one to become a hero.