the tone of
assured conviction. His bright blue eyes above his ruddy mustache and
bronzed cheeks, were clear and tranquil as those of a child.

Alden was immensely interested and amused. He was a member of the Boston
branch of the Society for Ancestral Culture, and he recognized the
favourite tenet of his sect,--the doctrine that "blood will tell." He
was also a Harvard man, knowing almost everything and believing hardly
anything. Heredity was one of the few unquestioned articles of his
creed. But the form in which this familiar confession of faith came to
him, on the banks of the Grande Decharge, from the lips of a somewhat
ragged and distinctly illiterate Canadian guide, was grotesque enough
to satisfy the most modern taste for new sensations. He listened with an
air of gravity, and a delighted sense of the humour of the situation.

"How did you find it out?" he asked.

"Well, then," continued Jean, "I will tell you how the news came to me.
It was at St. Gedeon, one Sunday last March. The snow was good and hard,
and I drove in, ten miles on the lake, from our house opposite Grosse
Ile. After mass, a man, evidently of the city, comes to me in the stable
while I feed the horse, and salutes me.

"'Is this Jean Lamotte?'

"'At your service, m'sieu'.'

"'Son of Francois Louis Lamotte?'

"'Of no other. But he is dead, God give him repose.'

"'I been looking for you all through Charlevoix and Chicoutimi.'

"'Here you find me then, and good-day to you,' says I, a little short,
for I was beginning to be shy of him.

"'Chut, chut,' says he, very friendly. 'I suppose you have time to talk
a bit. How would you like to be a marquis and have a castle in France
with a hundred thousand dollars?'

"For a moment I think I will lick him; then I laugh. 'Very well indeed,'
says I, 'and also a handful of stars for buckshot, and the new moon for
a canoe.'

"'But no,' answers the man. 'I am earnest, Monsieur Lamotte. I want to
talk a long talk with you. Do you permit that I accompany you to your
residence?'

"Residence! You know that little farm-house of logs where my mother
lives,--you saw it last summer. But of course it is a pretty good house.
It is clean. It is warm. So I bring the man home in the sleigh. All that
evening he tells the story. How our name Lamotte is really De la Motte
de la Luciere. How there belongs to that name an estate and a title
in France, now thirty years with no one to claim it. How he, being an