its food from the
deep. The business had broadened, too, as the Prairie States became more
thickly settled, namely, the salting and packing for sale of these
fresh-water fish. Barrels stood on the piers, and brisk agents, with
pencils behind their ears, stirred the slow-moving villagers into
activity, as the man with a pole stirs up the bears. Fur-bearing animals
had had their day; it was now the turn of the creatures of the deep.

"Let us stop at the church-house a moment and see Miss Lois," said Rast,
as, dragging the empty sled behind him, he walked by Anne's side through
the village street toward the Agency.

"I am afraid I have not time, Rast."

"Make it, then. Come, Annet, don't be ill-natured. And, besides, you
ought to see that I go there, for I have not called upon Miss Lois this
year."

"As this year only began last week, you are not so very far behind,"
said the girl, smiling. "Why can you not go and see Miss Lois alone?"

"I should be welcome, at any rate; _she_ adores me."

"Does she, indeed!"

"Yes, Miss Douglas, she does. She pretends otherwise, but that is always
the way with women. Oh! I know the world."

"You are only one year older than I am."

"In actual time, perhaps; but twenty years older in knowledge."

"What will you be, then, when you come back from college? An old man?"

"By no means; for _I_ shall stay where I am. But in the mean time you
will catch up with me."

Handsome Rast had passed through his novitiate, so he thought. His
knowledge of the world was derived partly from Lieutenant Walters, who,
although fresh from West Point, was still several years older than young
Pronando, and patronized him accordingly, and partly from a slender,
low-voiced Miss Carew, who was thirty, but appeared twenty, after the
manner of slender yellow-white blondes who have never possessed any
rose-tints, having always been willowy and amber-colored. Miss Carew
sailed, for a summer's amusement through the Great Lakes of the West;
and then returned Eastward with the opinion that they were but so many
raw, blank, inland oceans, without sensations or local coloring enough
to rouse her. The week on the island, which was an epoch in Rast's life,
had held for her but languid interest; yet even the languid work of a
master-hand has finish and power, and Rast was melancholy and silent for
fifteen days after the enchantress had departed. Then he wrote to her
one or two wild letters, and received no answer;