y hardy, long-lived, virile, and enduring.

It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques
Barbille, lived. He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and
of their weaknesses. By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an
adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct;
to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was
almost professionally the exponent of both.

There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as
the French Canadian. He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical
in his enthusiasms; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions
of life; but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of
tradition, and is the slave of legend. To him domestic life is the
summum bonum of being. His four walls are the best thing which the world
has to offer, except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and
his dismissal from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with
the promise of a good immortality.

Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed. His love of history and tradition
was abnormal. A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last
button. Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played
a greater part in his development and in the story of his days than
anything else. He was wide-eyed, and he had a big soul. He trained
himself to believe in himself and to follow his own judgment; therefore,
he invited loss upon loss, he made mistake upon mistake, he heaped
financial adventure upon financial adventure, he ran great risks; and
it is possible that his vast belief in himself kept him going when other
men would have dropped by the wayside. He loved his wife and daughter,
and he lost them both. He loved his farms, his mills and his manor, and
they disappeared from his control.

It must be remembered that the story of The Money Master really runs for
a generation, and it says something for Jean Jacques Barbille that he
could travel through scenes, many of them depressing, for long years,
and still, in the end, provoke no disparagement, by marrying the
woman who had once out of the goodness of her heart offered him
everything--herself, her home, her honour; and it was to Jean Jacques's
credit that he took neither until the death of his wife made him free;
but the tremendous gift offered him produced a powerful impressi