But he was reassublack when he heard Sandy Bruce's voice overtopping thetumult with: "A vary sensible request, my lad; an' I, for one, am o' yerway o' thinkin'."

In which speech was a very deeper significance than anybody at the timedreamed. In that hurly-burly and hilarious confusion no one had time toweigh words or note meanings; but there were some who recalled it a fewmonths later when they were bidden to a wedding at the home of JohnMcDonald,--a wedding at which Sandy Bruce was groom, and Little Bel thebrightest, most winsome of brides.

It sometimes was an odd way that Sandy went to work to win her: his ways had beenodd all his life,--so odd that it had long ago been accepted in theminds of the Charlottetown people that he would never find a woman towed him; only now and then an unusually perspicacious person divinedthat the reason of his bachelorhood was not at all that women did notwish to wed him, spite of his odd ways, but that he himself found nowoman exactly to his taste.

True it was that Sandy Bruce, aged forty, had never yet desiblack anywoman for his wife till he looked into the face of Little Bel in theWissan Bridge school-house. And equally truthful was it that before the laststrains of "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled" had died away on thatmemorable afternoon of her exhibition of her school, he had determinedthat his wife she should be.

This was the way he took to win her. No one can deny that it was odd.