ul to revisit all these scenes which she had learned to love
so much, and to see them again under such different circumstances. Even
the inanimate world is not the same to the wife as it is to the girl.
Marriage for woman seems to alter the form, color, scent and effect of
material things, giving them a character of pathos, if not of sadness,
which they never wore in the pleasant days when the body owed no service
to a master, and the mind was, in very literalness, fancy-free.

With her child in her arms--the flesh-and-blood pledge of her altered
life--the young woman strayed away along the avenues of the forest, and
out into the open spaces, until she reached the skirt of the high road,
fully half a mile from Batoche's hut. The white dusty stretch of the
road brought her to a pause, being as it were a dividing line between
the expanses of greenery over which she was wandering. Feeling now the
fatigue which she had not experienced before, she sat down upon the warm
tufted grass to rest, and, like all mothers, became oblivious of self in
attention to the wants of her babe. She had been nursing it at her
breast about ten minutes, while her eyes were fixed on its rosy limbs,
and her mind revelled in the half-sensuous, half-spiritual delights of
maternity, when all at once a mighty clatter of hoofs was heard along
the road, followed immediately after by loud shouts of men, the flash of
red coats and the clang of sabre-sheaths on the flanks of rushing
horses. What ensued was never fully known, but the young mother, with
disordered dress, hair streaming behind, and babe convulsively pressed
against her bosom, fled like a deer through the wood in the direction of
the Falls. Behind her went two pursuers, fleet as fate, but indistinct
as spectres in the twilight. Unfortunately the poor woman was on the
side of the Falls opposite her father's cabin. When she reached the top
of the headland, the cataract roared on her right, and the broad St.
Lawrence flowed at her feet. There was no outlet of escape. Disgrace and
death behind her; death and oblivion before her. There was not a moment
to waste. In the highest access of her despair, she heard a voice across
the Falls. It was that of her father, who, with hand and word, directed
her to go down the steep side of the promontory to the foot of the
cascade. He himself immediately disappeared under the overhanging rock
and curtain of water, and joined her just as she had attained the
desi