Jacques was in
demand. The ladies liked him; his manners were so pleasant, and they
took a great interest in his music. Moody bought a piano for the parlour
that summer; and there were two or three good players in the house,
to whom Jacques would listen with delight, sitting on a pile of logs
outside the parlour windows in the warm August evenings.

Some one asked him whether he did not prefer the piano to the violin.

"NON," he answered, very decidedly; "dat piano, he vairee smart; he
got plentee word, lak' de leetle yellow bird in de cage--'ow you call
heem--de cannarie. He spik' moch. Bot dat violon, he spik' more deep, to
de heart, lak' de Rossignol. He mak' me feel more glad, more sorree--dat
fo' w'at Ah lak' heem de bes'!"

Through all the occupations and pleasures of the summer Jacques kept as
near as he could to Serena. If he learned a new tune, by listening to
the piano--some simple, artful air of Mozart, some melancholy echo of
a nocturne of Chopin, some tender, passionate love-song of Schubert--it
was to her that he would play it first. If he could persuade her to a
boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday evening, the week was complete.
He even learned to know the more shy and delicate forest-blossoms that
she preferred, and would come in from a day's guiding with a tiny bunch
of belated twin-flowers, or a few purple-fringed orchids, or a handful
of nodding stalks of the fragrant pyrola, for her.

So the summer passed, and the autumn, with its longer hunting
expeditions into the depth of the wilderness; and by the time winter
came around again, Fiddlin' Jack was well settled at Moody's as
a regular Adirondack guide of the old-fashioned type, but with a
difference. He improved in his English. Something of that missing
quality which Moody called ambition, and to which Hose Ransom gave the
name of imagination, seemed to awaken within him. He saved his wages. He
went into business for himself in a modest way, and made a good turn in
the manufacture of deerskin mittens and snow-shoes. By the spring he had
nearly three hundred dollars laid by, and bought a piece of land from
Ransom on the bank of the river just above the village.

The second summer of guiding brought him in enough to commence building
a little house. It was of logs, neatly squared at the corners; and there
was a door exactly in the middle of the facade, with a square window
at either side, and another at each end of the house, according to the