ness of her foot and ankle. She also
has the swiftest, as well as the softest of glances, and I felt it
travel from my brogues to my head, approving the journey, I fancied.

"I have been particular about Madame Angelique because she is a woman
in a thousand, this frail beauty of New France, its Madame de Pompadour
in brilliance, however the comparison may hold in virtue, and because,
if I prosper at all in the friendship, I hope to hear from her the
inner news of events here which, by its usefulness to General Wolfe, is
to lead me far in my home desires. When I left Scotland I had a sore
heart, for truly it fills that heart, but you will gather that I have
found a fresh land which also has its milk and honey.

"How much of them shall I sip? That's the gamble, and time will tell,
but it is a great gamble in which I am enlisted, and, by my faith, I
like a gamble. It stirs the blood in me, makes it run as it ran when I
made love to my first sweetheart, and a strapping lass she was, though,
alas! I have almost forgotten her very existence. Poor Carrie! I
wonder, I wonder, but hi, ho! what use to ask of the flowers of
yesterday, where are they?

"Only, my dear Captain Gordon, I wish I could have taken you with me
last evening to that romp at the Chateau Bigot. Yes, I remember, your
tastes are different from my own--less elastic, shall we say?--and you
might not have come. Well, set love and gambling and sport, all done
with abandon, in a choice, beflowered fold of this New France country
and you may realize what you have missed and I have seen.

"Revelry! That is not the word for the night, and it took all the
seriousness in me to recall that I had other interests among the
revellers besides theirs. My elegance in our Highland dress, for to be
sure I wore it, cost me many a temptation, and if Madame Angelique,
late in the evening, had gone a minute longer with her whimsical
measurings of my leg where it garters, why, sir, I should have made a
fool of myself. But she merely said she wanted to test whether I was
not modelled to perfection for dancing the Highland dances, and
wouldn't I oblige her and the company?

"Monsieur Bigot, lolling in a chair, beslippered, be-hosed in the
fatness of his limbs, be-waistcoated round his windy paunch, wearing
velvet knee-breeches and a plum-coloured coat, what should he do, for
his ears miss little, but catch this remark and, wishing, I suppose, to
keep me from any further