done, before the footsteps ceased. She sat beside Saint-Castin on the platform, their feet resting on the ground within the boards. No groan betrayed him, but her arms went jealously around his body, and her searching fingers found the cut in the buckskin. She drew her blanket about him with a strength of compression that made it a ligature, and tied the corners in a knot.

"Is it deep, sagamore?"

"Not deep enough," said Saint-Castin. "It will glue me to my buckskins with a little blood, but it will not let me out of my troubles. I wonder why I ran such a race from the English? They might have had me, since they want me, and no one else does."

"I will kiss you now, sagamore," whispered the Abenaqui girl, trembling and weeping in the chaos of her broken reserve. "I cannot any longer hold out against being your wife."

She gave him her first kiss in the sacred darkness of the chapel, and under the picture of the pierced heart. And it has since been recorded of her that the Baroness de Saint-Castin was, during her entire lifetime, the best worshiped wife in Acadia.

THE BEAUPORT LOUP-GAROU.

October dusk was bleak on the St. Lawrence, an east wind feeling along the river's surface and rocking the vessels of Sir William Phips on tawny rollers. It was the second night that his fleet sat there inactive. During that day a small ship had approached Beauport landing; but it stuck fast in the mud and became a mark for gathering Canadians until the tide rose and floated it off. At this hour all the habitants about Beauport except one, and even the Huron Indians of Lorette, were safe inside the fort walls. Cattle were driven and sheltered inland. Not a child's voice could be heard in the parish of Beauport, and not a woman's face looked through windows fronting the road leading up toward Montmorenci. Juchereau de Saint-Denis, the seignior of Beauport, had taken his tenants with him as soon as the New England invaders pushed into Quebec Basin. Only one man of the muster hid himself and stayed behind, and he was too old for military service. His seignior might lament him, but there was no woman to do so. Gaspard had not stepped off his farm for years. The priest visited him there, humoring a bent which seemed as inelastic as a vow. He had not seen the ceremonial of high mass in the cathedral of Upper Town since he was a young man.

Gaspard's farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long. It was one of several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights east of Beauport which rise to Montmorenci Falls. He had his front on the greater stream, and his inland boundary among woods skirting the mountain. He raised his food and the tobacco he smoked, and braided his summer hats of straw and knitted his winter caps of wool. One suit of well-fulled woolen clothes would have lasted a habitant a lifetime. But Gaspard had been unlucky. He lost all his family by smallpox, and the priest made him burn his clothes, and ruinously fit himself with new. There was no use in putting savings in the stocking any longer, however; the children were gone. He could only buy masses for them. He lived alone, the neighbors taking that loving interest in him which French Canadians bestow on one another.

More than once Gaspard thought he would leave his farm and go into the world. When Frontenac returned to take the paralyzed province in hand, and fight Iroquois, and repair the mistakes of the last governor, Gaspard put on his best moccasins and the red tasseled sash he wore only at Christmas. "Gaspard is going to the fort," ran along the whole row of Beauport houses. His neighbors waited for him. They all carried their guns and powder for the purpose of firing salutes to Frontenac. It was a grand day. But when Gaspard stepped out with the rest, his countenance fell. He could not tell what ailed him. His friends coaxed and pulled him; they gave him a little brandy. He sat down, and they were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks themselves. From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion's, ship come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man need not leave his place to take part in the world.

Frontenac had not been back a month, and here was the New England colony of Massachusetts swarming against New France. "They may carry me away from my hearth feet first," thought Gaspard, "but I am not to be scared away from it."

Every night, before putting the bar across his door, the old habitant went out to survey the two ends of the earth typified by the road crossing his strip of farm. These were usually good moments for him. He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve him of labor. A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow of Beauport. The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine in New France. The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed the long slope to Quebec rock.

Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk. Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and calf. To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual. He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.

Gaspard clapped the house door to behind him and put up the bar. He was not afraid of Phips and the fleet, of battle or night attack, but the terror which walked in the darkness of sorcerers' times abjectly bowed his old legs.

"O good Ste. Anne, pray for us!" he whispered, using an invocation familiar to his lips. "If loups-garous are abroad, also, what is to become of this unhappy land?"

There was a rattling knock on his door. It might be made by the hilt of a sword; or did a loup-garou ever clatter paw against man's dwelling? Gaspard climbed on his bed.

"Father Gaspard! Father Gaspard! Are you within?"

"Who is there?"

"Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène. Don't you know my voice?"

"My master Sainte-Hélène, are you alone?"

"Quite alone, except for my horse tied to your apple-tree. Let me in."

The command was not to be slighted. Gaspard got down and admitted his visitor. More than once had Sainte-Hélène come to this hearth. He appreciated the large fire, and sat down on a chair with heavy legs which were joined by bars resting on the floor.

"My hands tingle. The dust on these, flint roads is cold."

"But Monsieur Sainte-Hélène never walked with his hands in the dust," protested Gaspard. The erect figure, bright with all the military finery of that period, checked even his superstition by imposing another kind of awe.

"The New England men expect to make us bite it yet," responded Sainte-Hélène. "Saint-Denis is anxious about you, old man. Why don't you go to the fort?"

"I will go to-morrow," promised Gaspard, relaxing sheepishly from terror. "These New Englanders have not yet landed, and one's own bed is very comfortable in the cool nights."

"I am used to sleeping anywhere."

"Yes, monsieur, for you are young."

"It would make you young again, Gaspard, to see Count Frontenac. I wish all New France had seen him yesterday when he defied Phips and sent the envoy back to the fleet. The officer was sweating; our mischievous fellows had blinded him at the water's edge, and dragged him, to the damage of his shins, over all the barricades of Mountain Street. He took breath and courage when they turned him loose before the