uscious field, and Doctor Chantry was
permitted to turn me loose in it, so that the books were almost like my
own. I carried them around hid in my breast; my coat-skirts were
weighted with books. There were Plutarch's Lives in the old French of
Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille's
tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne's essays, in ten volumes; Thomson's
poems, and Chesterfield's letters, in English; the life of Petrarch;
three volumes of Montesquieu's works; and a Bible; which I found greatly
to my taste. It was a wide and catholic taste.

De Chaumont spent nearly all that autumn and winter in Castorland,
where he was building his new manor and founding his settlement called
Le Rayville. As soon as I became a member of his household his
patriarchal kindness was extended to me, though he regarded me simply as
an ambitious half-breed.

The strong place which he had built for his first holding in the
wilderness thus grew into a cloistered school for me. It has vanished
from the spot where it stood, but I shall forever see it between lake
and forest.

Annabel de Chaumont openly hated the isolation of the place, and was
happy only when she could fill it with guests. But Madame de Ferrier
evidently loved it, remaining there with Paul and Ernestine. Sometimes I
did not see her for days together. But Mademoiselle de Chaumont, before
her departure to her Baltimore convent for the winter, amused herself
with my education. She brought me an old book of etiquette in which
young gentlemen were admonished not to lick their fingers or crack bones
with their teeth at table. Nobody else being at hand she befooled with
Doctor Chantry and me, and I saw for the first time, with surprise, an
old man's infatuation with a poppet.

It was this foolishness of her brother's which Miss Chantry could not
forgive De Chaumont's daughter. She was incessant in her condemnation,
yet unmistakably fond in her English way of the creature she condemned.
Annabel loved to drag my poor master in flowery chains before his
relative. She would make wreaths of crimson leaves for his bald head,
and exhibit him grinning like a weak-eyed Bacchus. Once he sat doting
beside her at twilight on a bench of the wide gallery while his sister,
near by, kept guard over their talk. I passed them, coming back from my
tramp, with a glowing branch in my hand. For having set my teeth in the
scarlet tart udder of a sumach, all frosted with deli