er where were
Jean Jacques Barbille's house and mills. They flourished chiefly on the
opposite side of the Beau Cheval, whose waters flowed so waywardly--now
with a rush, now silently away through long reaches of country. Here
the land was rugged and bold, while farther on it became gentle and
spacious, and was flecked or striped with farms on which low, white
houses with dormer-windows and big stoops flashed to the passer-by the
message of the pioneer, "It is mine. I triumph."

At the Manor Cartier, not far from the town of Vilray, where Jean
Jacques was master, and above it and below it, there had been battles
and the ravages of war. At the time of the Conquest the stubborn
habitants, refusing to accept the yielding of Quebec as the end of
French power in their proud province, had remained in arms and active,
and had only yielded when the musket and the torch had done their work,
and smoking ruins marked the places where homes had been. They took
their fortune with something of the heroic calm of men to whom an
idea was more than aught else. Jean Jacques' father, grandfather, and
great-great-grandfather had lived here, no one of them rising far, but
none worthless or unnoticeable. They all had had "a way of their own,"
as their neighbours said, and had been provident on the whole. Thus it
was that when Jean Jacques' father died, and he came into his own, he
found himself at thirty a man of substance, unmarried, who "could
have had the pick of the province." This was what the Old Cure said in
despair, when Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married
l'Espagnole, or "the Spanische," as the lady was always called in the
English of the habitant.

When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all. It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir. The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging
cry of a saw-mill. Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it. So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour's in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques, having spent a year at L