treme. He is
talking dangerously; for he will make me vain."

"Does the ceaseless wooing of the sweet wild rose by soft
winds, make that blossom vain? or is the moon spoilt
because all the summer night ten thousand streams running
under it sing to it unnumbered praises? As easy, ma Marie,
to make vain the rose or the moon as to turn your head
by telling your perfections."

"Monsieur covers me with confusion!" and the little sweet
told the truth. But it was a confusion very exquisite to
her. It sang like entrancing music through her veins;
and gave her a delightful delirium about the temples,
flow fair all the glorious great round of the night, and
the broad earth lit by the moon, seemed to her now, with
the music of his words coursing through her being.
Everything was transfigured by a holy beauty, for Love
had sanctified it, and clothed it with his own mystic,
wonderful garments. It was with poor Marie, then, as it
has some time or other been with us all: when every bird
that sang, every leaf that whispered, had in its tone a
cadence caught from the one loved voice. I have seen the
steeple strain, and rock, and heard the bells peal out
in all their clangourous melody, and I have fancied that
this delirious ecstasy of sound that bathed the earth
and went up to heaven was the voice of one slim girl with
dimples and sea-green eyes.

The mischievous young Scotchman had grown more serious
than Marie had ever seen him before.

"I hope, my child, that you will be happy here; the
customs of the people differ from yours, but your nature
is receptive to everything good and elevated, so that I
am certain you will soon grow to cherish our civilization."

I must say here for the benefit of the drivelling,
cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never
looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is
always on the search for a flaw, that I send passages
from Tennyson floating through my Marie's brain with good
justification. She had received a very fair education
at a convent in Red River. She could speak and write both
French and English with tolerable accuracy; and she could
with her supple, tawny little fingers, produce a nice
sketch of a prairie tree-clump, upon a sheet of cartridge
paper, or a piece of birch rind.

Young Scott was all the while growing more serious, and
even becoming pathetic, which is a sign of something very
delicious, and not uncommon, when you are travelling
under a bewitching