vitriol or something worse. No wonder that men become fiends incarnate
on such "fire-water" as that!

By-and-by they slept,--two of them outside, by the fire,--Falardeau
inside the wigwam, the repose of which was broken by the hollow rattle
of his drunken breath.

In the dead of the night something clutched me by the arm. It was the
ugly squaw, who forced a greasy butcher-knife into my hand, pointing
towards where the raftsman lay, and whispering to me in
English,--"Stick heem! stick heem!--nobody never know. He kill my
brother long time ago with this old knife. Kill heem! kill heem now!"

I did not avail myself of the opportunity thus afforded me for the
improvement of river society: nay, worse, I connived at the further
career of the redoubtable Rupert Falardeau, Junior; for, on leaving in
the morning, I roused him with repeated kicks, thus saving him for
that time, probably, from the Damoclesian blade of the _vengeresse_.

_L'ete de Saint Martin_!--how blue and yellow it is in the marshes in
those days! It is the name given by the French Canadians to the Indian
Summer,--the Summer of St. Martin, whose anniversary-day falls upon
the eleventh of November; though the brief latter-day tranquillity
called after him arrives, generally, some two or three weeks earlier.
Looking lakeward from the sedgy nook in which we are waiting for the
coming of the wood-ducks, the low line of water, blue and calm, is
broken at intervals by the rise of the distant _masquallonge_, as he
plays for a moment on the surface. But the channels that separate the
flat, alluvial islets are yellow, their sluggish waters being bedded
heavily down with the broad leaves of the wintering basswood-trees,
which, in some places, touch branch-tips across the narrow straits.
The muskrat's hut is thatched with the wet, dead leaves,--no thanks to
_him_; and there is a mat of them before his door,--a heavy, yellow
mat, on which are scattered the azure shells of the fresh-water clams
to be found so often upon the premises of this builder. Does he sup on
them, or are they only the cups and saucers of his vegeto-aquarian
_menage_? Blue and yellow all,--the sky and the sedge-rows, the calm
lake and the canoe, the plashing basswood-leaves and the oval, azure
shells.

Also Marance, the _voyageur's_ buxom young daughter, who came with us,
today, commissioned to cull herbs of wondrous properties among the
vine-tangled thickets of the islands. Blue and yellow. Eyes