When he was asked where he got this fancy name, he said, lightly, he did not know; it was a good Scotch name.  This was not true.  Donald knew very well.  On the window-sill in his mother’s kitchen had stood always a pot of pink heather.  Come summer, come winter, the place was never without a young heather growing; and the dainty pink bells were still to Donald the man, as they had been to Donald the child, the loveliest flowers in the world.  But he would not for the profits of many a trip have told his comrade captains why he had named his boat the “Heather Bell.”  He had a sentiment about the name which he himself hardly understood.  It seemed out of all proportion to the occasion; but a day was coming when it would seem more like a prophecy than a mere sentiment.  He had builded better than he knew when he chose that name for the thing nearest his heart.

Charlottetown is not a gay place; its standards and methods of amusement are simple and primitive.  Among the summer pleasures of the young people picnics still rank high, and picnic excursions by steamboat or sloop highest of all.  Through June and July hardly a daily newspaper can be found which does not contain the advertisement of one or more of these excursions.  After Donald made his little boat so fresh and gay with the pink and green colors, and gave her the winning new name, she came to be in great demand for these occasions.

How much the captain’s good looks had to do with the “Heather Bell’s” popularity as a pleasure-boat it would not do to ask; but there was reason enough for her being liked aside from that.  Sweet and fresh in and out, with white deck, the chairs and settees all painted green, and a gay streamer flying,—­white, with three green bars,—­and “Donald Mackintosh, Captain,” in green letters, and below these a spray of pink heather, she looked more like a craft for festive sailing than for cruising about from one farm-landing to another, picking up odds and ends of farm produce,—­eggs and butter, and oats and wool,—­with now and then a passenger.  Donald liked this slow cruising and the market-work best; but the picnic parties were profitable, and he took them whenever he could.  He kept apart, however, from the merry-makers as much as possible, and was always glad at night when he had landed his noisy cargo safe back at the Charlottetown piers.

This disposition on his part to hold himself aloof was greatly irritating to the Charlottetown girls, and to no one of them so much as to pretty Katie McCloud, who, because she was his second cousin and had known him all her life, felt, and not without reason, that he ought to pay her something in the shape or semblance of attention when she was on board his boat, even if she were a member of a large and gay party, most of whom were strangers to him.  There was another reason, too; but Katie had kept it so long locked in the bottom of her heart that she hardly realized its force and cogency, and, if she had, would have laughed, and put it as far from her thoughts as she could.