It was a wonder that the warm-hearted fellow had kept a cheery nature and face all these years living thus.  But the “Heather Bell” stood to him in place of wife, children, home.  There is no passion in life so like the passion of a man for a woman as the passion of a sailor for his craft; and this passion Donald had to the full.  It was odd how he came to be a born sailor.  His father and his father’s fathers, as far back as they knew, had been farmers—­three generations of them—­on the Prince Edward Island farm where Donald was born; and still more generations of them in old Scotland.  Pure Scotch on both sides of the house for hundreds of years were the Mackintoshes, and the Gaelic tongue was to-day freer spoken in their houses than English.

The Mackintosh farm on Prince Edward Island was in the parish of Orwell Head, and Donald’s earliest transgressions and earliest pleasures were runaway excursions to the wharves of that sleepy shore.  To him Spruce Wharf was a centre of glorious maritime adventure.  The small sloops that plied up and down the coast of the island, running in at the inlets, and stopping to gather up the farmers’ produce and take it to Charlottetown markets, seemed to him as grand as Indiamen; and when, in his twelfth year, he found himself launched in life as a boy-of-all-work on one of these sloops, whose captain was a friend of his father’s, he felt that his fortune was made.  And so it was.  He was in the line of promotion by virtue of his own enthusiasm.  No plank too small for the born sailor to swim by.  Before Donald was twenty-five he himself commanded one of these little coasting-vessels.  From this he took a great stride forward, and became first officer on the iron-clad steamer plying between Charlottetown and the mainland.  The winter service on this boat was terrible,—­ploughing and cutting through nearly solid ice for long days and nights of storm.  Donald did not like it.  He felt himself lost out in the wild channel.  His love was for the water near shore,—­for the bays, inlets, and river-mouths he had known since he was a child.

He began to think he was not so much of a sailor as he had supposed,—­so great a shrinking grew up in him winter after winter from the perils and hardships of the mail-steamer’s route.  But he persevered and bided his time, and in ten years had the luck to become owner and master of a trim little coasting-steamer which had been known for years as the “Sally Wright,” making two trips a week from Charlottetown to Orwell Head,—­known as the “Sally Wright” no longer, however; for the first thing Donald did was to repaint her, from stem to stern, white, with green and pink stripes, on her prow a cluster of pink heather blossoms, and “Heather Bell” in big letters on the side.