red spot. No time was lost in explanations. Seizing the babe in his
right arm, and encircling his left around the waist of his daughter, the
valiant old man turned and disappeared again under the Fall. Overhead a
yell of baffled rage was heard above the thunder of the torrent, but it
was not repeated.

Batoche had not advanced many steps when he noticed that the burden on
his left arm was growing heavier and heavier--and, on looking down, he
observed with terror that his daughter had swooned. The grand flower of
love was broken on its stem. This circumstance added tenfold to the old
man's peril. The slightest slip of his foot, the slightest jolt from the
perpendicular, the slightest deviation from the protecting line of the
granite wall, would hurl him and his precious freight into destruction.
If he could only reach the subterranean cavity which opened about midway
on his path, he might stop there to rest and all would be well. He
dragged along slowly in this hope; his eyes strained till they saw the
welcome haven approaching. A few more steps and he would reach it. He
_did_ reach it. As he bent down, on his right, to place the babe on a
ledge of rock within the cave, he felt a sudden wrench on his left arm,
then a sense of looseness, and to his horror he found that the circle
made by his arm upon his hip was empty. His daughter had glided like a
broken lily into the seething basin, at the point where the waters of
the cataract fall sheer like lead, and where they at once battered the
life out of her bare white breast.

"Great God of earth and heaven! What is this?" cried the old man, with
eyes starting from their sockets.

Then, with a gesture of despair, he took up the child, held it aloft on
his arm, and would have jumped into the gulf with it to complete the
sacrifice of misery. But his fierce eye turned and caught that of the
babe which was mellow with laughing light. There was also a smile upon
its lip, and its chubby little hand flourished a wisp of grass plucked
from a fissure in the ledge. That look, that smile, were like a flash of
Paradise. The old man lowered the child to his breast, folded both arms
over it, and rapidly passed out under the Fall. From that moment little
Blanche never left him.

Such was the story gathered from Batoche himself, and which is still
repeated as one of the traditions of Montmorenci. The hermit always
insisted that his daughter's death was caused by two drunken British
caval