s the president of
several societies for ethical agitation--a long woman, with short hair
and eyeglasses and a great thirst for tea; not very good in a canoe, but
always wanting to run the rapids and go into the dangerous places, and
talking all the time. Yes; that must have been the one. She was not a
bosom friend of mine, to speak accurately, but I remembered her well.

"Well, then, m'sieu'," continued Patrick, "it was this demoiselle who
changed my mind about the smoking. But not in a moment, you understand;
it was a work of four days, and she spoke much.

"The first day it was at the Island House; we were trolling for
ouananiche, and she was not pleased, for she lost many of the fish. I
was smoking at the stern of the canoe, and she said that the tobacco was
a filthy weed, that it grew in the devil's garden, and that it smelled
bad, terribly bad, and that it made the air sick, and that even the pig
would not eat it."

I could imagine Patrick's dismay as he listened to this dissertation;
for in his way he was as sensitive as a woman, and he would rather have
been upset in his canoe than have exposed himself to the reproach of
offending any one of his patrons by unpleasant or unseemly conduct.

"What did you do then, Pat?" I asked.

"Certainly I put out the pipe--what could I do otherwise? But I thought
that what the demoiselle Meelair has said was very strange, and not
true--exactly; for I have often seen the tobacco grow, and it springs
up out of the ground like the wheat or the beans, and it has beautiful
leaves, broad and green, with sometimes a red flower at the top. Does
the good God cause the filthy weeds to grow like that? Are they not all
clean that He has made? The potato--it is not filthy. And the onion?
It has a strong smell; but the demoiselle Meelair she ate much of the
onion--when we were not at the Island House, but in the camp.

"And the smell of the tobacco--this is an affair of the taste. For me,
I love it much; it is like a spice. When I come home at night to the
camp-fire, where the boys are smoking, the smell of the pipes runs far
out into the woods to salute me. It says, 'Here we are, Patrique; come
in near to the fire.' The smell of the tobacco is more sweet than the
smell of the fish. The pig loves it not, assuredly; but what then? I am
not a pig. To me it is good, good, good. Don't you find it like that,
m'sieu'?"

I had to confess that in the affair of taste I sided with Patrick rathe