o not know just what to do with the purple mountains of
Vermont, seen vague against the horizon from the St. Lawrence, or with
the quaint little French villages that begin to show themselves as you
penetrate farther down into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful, with
their dormer-windowed cottages clustering about their church-spires,
that it seems impossible they could once have been the homes of the
savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knife
and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England for a hundred years.
But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St.
Regis, in which was kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames,
waking her people from their sleep to meet instant death or taste the
bitterness of a captivity. The bell which was sent out from France for
the Indian converts of the Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship
and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called
the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priest-led
Indians and 'habitans' across hundreds of miles of winter and of
wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration,--this fateful bell still
hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and
vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so
pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. Our friends would fair
have heard it as they passed, hoping for some mournful note of history
in its sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet, which, as it
lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river's side, seemed as lifeless as
the Deerfield burnt long ago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who had just appeared in a
mustard-colored linen duster, and Basil asked, "Shouldn't you like to
know the origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a gentleman
who goes about in a duster of that particular tint? Or, that gentleman
yonder with his eye tied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose he's
travelling for pleasure? Look at those young people from Omaha: they
haven't ceased flirting or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you
think everybody has such spirits out at Omaha? But behold a yet more
surprising figure than any we have yet seen among this boat-load of
nondescripts."

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face of somewhat foreign
cast, and well dressed, with a certain impressive difference from the
rest in the cut of his clothes. But what most drew