gare, their hired man, they set about the task.

In the Province of Quebec there is much uncertainty in the spelling
and the use of names. A scattered people in a huge half-wild
country, unlettered for the most part and with no one to turn to for
counsel but the priests, is apt to pay attention only to the sound
of names, caring nothing about their appearance when written or the
sex to which they pertain. Pronunciation has naturally varied in one
mouth or another, in this family or that, and when a formal occasion
calls for writing, each takes leave to spell his baptismal name in
his own way, without a passing thought that there may be a canonical
form. Borrowings from other languages have added to the
uncertainties of orthography and gender. Individuals sign
indifferently, Denise, Denije or Deneije; Conrad or Courade; men
bear such names as Hermenegilde, Aglae, Edwige.

Edwige Legare had worked for the Chapdelaines these eleven summers.
That is to say, for wages of twenty dollars a month he was in
harness each day from four in the morning till nine at night at any
and every job that called for doing, bringing to it a sort of
frenzied and inexhaustible enthusiasm; for he was one of those men
incapable by his nature of working save at the full pitch of
strength and energy, in a series of berserk rages. Short and broad,
his eyes were the brightest blue--a thing rare in Quebec-at once
piercing and guileless, set in a visage the colour of clay that
always showed cruel traces of the razor, topped by hair of nearly
the same shade. With a pride in his appearance that was hard to
justify he shaved himself two or three times a week, always in the
evening, before the bit of looking-glass that hung over the pump and
by the feeble light of the little lamp-driving the steel through his
stiff beard with groans that showed what it cost him in labour and
anguish. Clad in shirt and trousers of brownish homespun, wearing
huge dusty boots, he was from head to heel of a piece with the soil,
nor was there aught in his face to redeem the impression of rustic
uncouthness.

Chapdelaine, his three sons and man, proceeded then to "make land."
The forest still pressed hard upon the buildings they had put up a
few years earlier: the little square house, the barn of planks that
gaped apart, the stable built of blackened logs and chinked with
rags and earth. Between the scanty fields of their clearing and the
darkly encircling woods lay a broad