hless and exhausted.

"Waal," said Hose Ransom, "that's jess the hightonedest music we ever
had to Bytown. You 're a reel player, Frenchy, that's what you are.
What's your name? Where'd you come from? Where you goin' to? What
brought you here, anyhow?"

"MOI?" said the fiddler, dropping his bow and taking a long breath.
"Mah nem Jacques Tremblay. Ah'll ben come fraum Kebeck. W'ere goin'? Ah
donno. Prob'ly Ah'll stop dis place, eef yo' lak' dat feedle so moch,
hein?"

His hand passed caressingly over the smooth brown wood of the violin. He
drew it up close to his face again, as if he would have kissed it, while
his eyes wandered timidly around the circle of listeners, and rested at
last, with a question in them, on the face of the hotel-keeper. Moody
was fairly warmed, for once, out of his customary temper of mistrust and
indecision. He spoke up promptly.

"You kin stop here jess long's you like. We don' care where you come
from, an' you need n't to go no fu'ther, less you wanter. But we ain't
got no use for French names round here. Guess we 'll call him Fiddlin'
Jack, hey, Sereny? He kin do the chores in the day-time, an' play the
fiddle at night."

This was the way in which Bytown came to have a lover of music among its
permanent inhabitants.

II

Jacques dropped into his place and filled it as if it had been made for
him. There was something in his disposition that seemed to fit him for
just the role that was vacant in the social drama of the settlement. It
was not a serious, important, responsible part, like that of a farmer,
or a store-keeper, or a professional hunter. It was rather an addition
to the regular programme of existence, something unannounced and
voluntary, and therefore not weighted with too heavy responsibilities.
There was a touch of the transient and uncertain about it. He seemed
like a perpetual visitor; and yet he stayed on as steadily as a native,
never showing, from the first, the slightest wish or intention to leave
the woodland village.

I do not mean that he was an idler. Bytown had not yet arrived at that
stage of civilization in which an ornamental element is supported at the
public expense.

He worked for his living, and earned it. He was full of a quick,
cheerful industry; and there was nothing that needed to be done about
Moody's establishment, from the wood-pile to the ice-house, at which he
did not bear a hand willingly and well.

"He kin work like a beaver," said