John McIntyre, still dressed in the fine black suit Martin had given him for the wedding, was slowly walking up the old swamp road toward the ravine. The festivities of the day, and the gracious manner of the Duke, had so wrought upon Sandy McQuarry that he had, in a moment of reckless extravagance, bidden his watchman take a rest that night, instead of returning to the mill. So Tim and he were going off on an important expedition. They had promised Martin that before he and Arabella returned they would walk down past the Drowned Lands and take a look at the fine new farm he had bought, and which they were all three to work together. And Tim's impatience demanded that they go this evening, for he had already laid great plans for sowing the entire three hundred acres with prize pumpkins, to be raised for the show.
John McIntyre moved along lingeringly, watching for the little, limping figure of his boy. He could see far up the green vista of the ravine, where the shades of evening were gathering. He smiled as he thought of the name the queer Englishman had given it; a Treasure Valley, indeed, the place had proved to him, for here, after long groping in darkness, he had found again the treasure of life.
He turned and looked back, his eyes following the course of the little stream. It wound past his old cabin, lost itself in the green wilderness of the Drowned Lands, and passed on again through the open fields to that rose-colored line on the horizon, where Lake Simcoe smiled responsive to the glow of the western heavens. He gazed at it earnestly, and was struck with the strange feeling that he had seen it all before, long ago. The slow music of a bell from a cow feeding far down the corduroy road echoed musically up the wooded aisle. Far off in a clover meadow a clear "cling-cling" floated up, where young Donald McKitterick stood sharpening his scythe. Some subtle influence seemed to have transported him into the past. He looked at the darkening purple of the woods, on one side, and at the sunny undulations of the fields on the other, and the feeling of familiarity grew stronger. This strange spirit of peace, this sense of tender associations, what was causing it? Then a little breeze, laden with the clean scent of running water, came dancing through the long grass, and all at once John McIntyre understood. In his blindness, he had not noticed it before--it was his old home come back to him! Here at his side ran the river that passed his farm, there was the strip of woodland; and yonder, on the horizon, not Lake Simcoe, but the dazzling stretches of the Bay of Fundy! And how wondrously like it all was, this evening, to that last peaceful night he remembered so well, just before the shadows of distress had begun to gather.