explanations, but they were unwilling to expose themselves to further misunderstanding.  Walking on a railway track is never very pleasant exercise, but this old Belle Ewart track was an abomination of sand and broken rails and irregular sleepers.  Coristine tried to step in time over the rotting cedar and hemlock ties, but, at the seventh step, stumbled and slid down the gravel bank of the road-bed.  “Where did the seven sleepers do their sleeping, Wilks?” he enquired.  “At Ephesus,” was the curt reply.  “Well, if they didn’t efface us both, they nearly did for one of us.”  “Coristine, if you are going to talk in that childlish way, we had better take opposite ends of the track; there are limits, sir.”

“That’s just what’s troubling me; there are far too many limits.  If this is what you call pedestrianizing, I say, give me a good sidewalk or the loan of an uneven pair of legs.  It’s dislocation of the hip or inflammatory rheumatism of the knee-joint I’ll be getting with this hop and carry one navigation.”  Wilkinson plodded on in dignified silence, till the sawmills of the deserted village came in sight, and, beyond it, the blue green waters of Lake Simcoe.  “Now,” he said, “we shall take to the water.”  “What?” enquired Coristine, “on our knapsacks?” to which his companion answered, “No, on the excellent steamer Emily May.”

There was no excellent steamer Emily May; there had not been for a long time; it was a memory of the past.  The railway had ruined navigation.  What was to be done?  It would never do to retrace their steps over the railroad ties, and the roads about Belle Ewart led nowhere, while to track it along the hot lake shore was not to be thought of.  Wilkinson’s plans had broken down; so Coristine left him at the village hostelry, and sallied forth on exploration bent.  In the course of his wanderings he came to a lumber wharf, alongside which lay an ancient schooner.

“Schooner ahoy!” he shouted, when a shock-headed man of uncertain middle age poked his head up through a hatchway, and answered:  “Ahoy yourself, and see how you like it.”  This was discouraging, but not to a limb of the law.  Coristine half removed his wide awake, and said:  “I have the pleasure of addressing the captain of the ship Susan Thomas,” the name he had seen painted in gold letters on the stern.

“Not adzackly,” replied the shock headed mariner, much mollified; “he’s my mate, and he’ll be along as soon as he’s made up his bundle.  I’m waitin’ for him to sail this yere schooner.”

“Where is the Susan Thomas bound for?”

“For Kempenfeldt Bay, leastways Barrie.”

“Could you take a couple of passengers, willing to pay properly for their passage?”

“Dassent; it’s agin the law; not but what I’d like to have yer, fer its lonesome, times.  Here comes the old man hisself; try him.”