The ruddy crest of the speaker gradually bristled till it stood on end like the comb of Chanticleer.  He paused and looked loweringly at the interrupter under his shaggy brows, pulling his under lip into his mouth in a moment of grim resolve.

“I’ll attend to you at the close of this divine service!” said Euroclydon.

And he did, while his latest convert held his coat.

“An almighty convincing exhorter!” said Abram Sugg from Maine, when Sylvanus had put the Ingersollian to bed in his own bunk, and was feeding him on potted turkey.

On the hillsides, with their roots deep in the crevices of the rocks, grew the pines.  One by one they fell all through that winter.  The strokes of the men’s axes rang clear in the frosty air as chisel rings on steel.  Whenever Sylvanus Cobb came out of the door of the warm log-hut where the men slept, the cold air met him like a wall.  He walked light-headed in the moistureless chill of the rare sub-Arctic air.  He heard the thunder of the logs down the chute.  The crash of a falling giant far away made him turn his head.  It was a life to lead, and he rubbed his hands as he thought of Edinburgh class-rooms.

Soon he became boss of the gang, and could contract for men of his own.  There was larger life in the land of resin and pine-logs.  No tune in all broad Scotland was so merry as the whirr of the sawmill, when the little flashing ribbon of light runs before the swift-cutting edge of the saw.  It made Sylvanus remember the pale sunshine his feet used to make on the tan-coloured sands of North Berwick, when he walked two summers before with May Chisholm, when it was low-water at the spring-tides.  But most of all he loved the mills, where he saw huge logs lifted out of the water, slid along the runners, and made to fall apart in clean-cut fragrant planks in a few seconds of time.

“That tree took some hundreds of years to grow, but the buzz-saw turns her into plain deal-boards before you can wink.  All flesh is grass,” soliloquised the logger preacher.

A winter in a lumber camp is a time when a man can put in loads of thinking.  Dried fish and boiled tea do not atrophy a man’s brain.  Loggers do not say much except on Sundays, when they wash their shirts.  Even then it was Sylvanus who did most of the talking.

Sometimes during the week a comrade would trudge alongside of him as he went out in the uncomfortable morning.

“That was the frozen truth you gave us on Sunday, I guess!” said one who answered placably to the name of Bob Ridley—­or, indeed, to any other name if he thought it was meant for him.  “I’ve swore off, parson, and I wrote that afternoon to my old mother.”

Such were the preacher’s triumphs.