aval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his
quaint, sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while
they amused his guests. They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.

But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day
when the young "Spanische" came driving up the river-road from the
steamboat-landing miles away. She arrived just when the clock struck
noon in the big living-room of the Manor. As she reached the open
doorway and the wide windows of the house which gaped with shady
coolness, she heard the bell summoning the workers in the mills and on
the farm--yes, M. Barbille was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to
"M'sieu' Jean Jacques," as he was called by everyone.

That the wedding had taken place far down in Gaspe and not in St.
Saviour's was a reproach and almost a scandal; and certainly it was
unpatriotic. It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry
outside one's own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young
people of the week's gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent
procession and tour through the parish brings, was little less than
treason. But there it was; and Jean Jacques was a man who had power to
hurt, to hinder, or to help; for the miller and the baker are nearer to
the hearthstone of every man than any other, and credit is a good thing
when the oven is empty and hard times are abroad. The wedding in Gaspe
had not been attended by the usual functions, for it had all been
hurriedly arranged, as the romantic circumstances of the wooing
required. Romance indeed it was; so remarkable that the master-musician
might easily have found a theme for a comedy--or tragedy--and the
philosopher would have shaken his head at the defiance it offered to the
logic of things.

Now this is the true narrative, though in the parish of St. Saviour's it
is more highly decorated and has many legends hanging to it like tassels
to a curtain. Even the Cure of to-day, who ought to know all the truth,
finds it hard to present it in its bare elements; for the history
of Jean Jacques Barbille affected the history of many a man in St.
Saviour's; and all that befel him, whether of good or evil, ran through
the parish in a thousand invisi