out another young clerk. "There's a man here from Red
River, one of the Selkirk settlers. He's come with word if we'll supply
the boats, lots of the colonists are ready to dig out. General
Assembly's going to consider that to-morrow."

"Oh! Hang the old Assembly if it ships that man out! He's got a pretty
daughter, perfect beauty, and she's here with him!" exclaimed the lad
with the mannish beard.

"Go to, thou light-head!" declared the other youth, with the air of an
elder in Israel. "Go to! You paraded beneath her window for an hour
to-day and she never once laid eyes on you."

All the men laughed.

"Hang it!" said the first speaker. "We don't display our little
amours----"

"No," broke in the other, "we just display our little contours and get
snubbed, eh?"

The bearded youth flushed at the sally of laughter.

"Hang it!" he answered, pulling fiercely at his moustache. "She is a bit
of statuary, so she is, as cold as marble. But there is no law against
looking at a pretty bit of statuary, when it frames itself in a window
in this wilderness."

To which, every man of the crowd said a hearty amen; and I walked off to
stretch myself full length on a bench, resolving to have out a mirror
from my packing case and get rid of those bristles that offended my
chin. The men began to disperse to their quarters. The tardy twilight of
the long summer evenings, peculiar to the far north, was gathering in
the courtyard. As the night-wind sighed past, I felt the velvet caress
of warm June air on my face and memory reverted to the innocent boyhood
days of Laval. How far away those days seemed! Yet it was not so long
ago. Surely it is knowledge, not time, that ages one, knowledge, that
takes away the trusting innocence resulting from ignorance and gives in
its place the distrustful innocence resulting from wisdom. I thought of
the temptations that had come to me in the few short weeks I had been
adrift, and how feebly I had resisted them. I asked myself if there were
not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star,
as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the
sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and
overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had
missed before--a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop
directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of
gold; for a wonderful mass of wavy hair cluster