It was an inspiring morning.  The sky was cloudless.  The air was charged with scent of spruce and balsam fir, wafted down by the breeze from the forest, lying in dark and solemn silence and spreading away from the near-by shore until it melted into the blue haze of rolling hills far to the northward.  The huge black back of a grampus rose a hundred feet from the boat and with a noise like the loud exhaust of steam sank again beneath the surface of the Bay.  Now and again a seal raised its head and looked curiously at the travellers and then hastily dived.  Gulls and terns soared and circled overhead, occasionally dipping to the water to capture a choice morsel of food.  A flock of wild geese, honking in flight, turned into a bight and alighted where a brook coursed down through a marsh to join the sea.

“There’s some geese,” remarked David, breaking the silence.  “They’re comin’ up south now.  We’ll have a hunt when we gets home.  They always feeds in that mesh when they’re bidin’ about the Bay.”

Presently Andy exclaimed: 

“I can tie un all!  I can tie every knot in the book!”

“I can tie un too!” said Jamie.

“Yes!  Yes!  There are the scout tests!” broke in Doctor Joe.  “Suppose we all tie the knots and pass the tests.”

Andy and Jamie tied them easily enough, and then Doctor Joe tied them himself to keep pace with the boys, and Andy relieved David at the tiller that he might try his hand at them; David not only tied all the knots illustrated in the handbook, but for good measure added a bowline on a bight, a double carrick bend, a marlin hitch and a halliard hitch.

“That’s wonderful easy to do,” David declared as he laid the rope down. “’Tis strange they calls that a test, ’tis so easy done.”

“Easy for us,” admitted Doctor Joe, “but for boys who have never had much to do with boats or ropes it’s a hard test, and an important one.  You chaps knew how to tie them, so in doing it you haven’t learned anything new.  Let us make up our minds as scouts to learn something new every day—­something we never knew before, no matter how small or unimportant it may seem.  Think what a lot we’ll know next year that we do not know now; everything we learn, too, is sure to be of use to us sometime in our lives.

“As we go along we’ll find there is a great deal to learn in this handbook, and all of it is worth knowing.  We don’t look far ahead.  Suppose we begin with the scout law.  With your good memories you’ll learn it before we go ashore to-night.  I want you to learn the twelve points of the law in order as they appear in the book, so that you can repeat them and tell me in your own words what each point means.”

Doctor Joe turned to the scout law and explained each point in detail.  When he told them that “A Scout is kind” meant that they must not only be kind to people, but that they must protect and not kill harmless birds and animals, David protested: