red of Madame de Ferrier's health I would continue:

"And Paul--how is Paul?"

Paul carried himself marvelously. He was learning to walk. Ernestine
believed the lie about knocking, and I felt bolder every time I told it.

The Indian part of me thought of going hunting and laying slaughtered
game at their door. But it was a doubtful way of pleasing, and the bears
hibernated, and the deer were perhaps a day's journey in the white
wastes.

I used to sing in the clear sharp air when I took to the frozen lake and
saw those heights around me. I look back upon that winter, across what
befell me afterwards, as a time of perfect peace; before virgin snows
melted, when the world was a white expanse of innocence.

Our weather-besieged manor was the center of it. Vaguely I knew there
was life on the other side of great seas, and that New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans were cities in which men moved
and had their being. My country, the United States, had bought from
Napoleon Bonaparte a large western tract called Louisiana, which
belonged to France. A new state named Ohio was the last added to the
roll of commonwealths. Newspapers, which the Indian runner once or twice
brought us from Albany, chronicled the doings of Aaron Burr,
Vice-President of the United States, who had recently drawn much
condemnation on himself by a brutal duel.

"Aaron Burr was here once," said my master.

"What is he like?" I inquired.

"A lady-killer."

"But he is next in dignity to the President."

Doctor Chantry sniffed.

"What is even the President of a federation like this, certain to fall
to pieces some fine day!"

I felt offended; for my instinct was to weld people together and hold
them so welded.

"If I were a president or a king," I told him, "and men conspired to
break the state, instead of parleying I would hang them up like dogs."

"Would you?"

Despising the country in which he found himself, my master took no
trouble to learn its politics. But since history had rubbed against us
in the person of Jerome Bonaparte, I wanted to know what the world was
doing.

"Colonel Burr had a pleasant gentleman with him at the manor," Doctor
Chantry added. "His name was Harmon Blennerhassett; a man of good
English stock, though having a wild Irish strain, which is deplorable."

The best days of that swift winter were Sundays, when my master left off
snapping, and stood up reverently in our dining-room to read his chu