THE STATESMAN'S DREAM.

As they went down the village, he continued to banter.

"You great Ontarians believe too firmly that there is no progress here.
According to you there is no being to be met in these forsaken wastes,
except a superstitious peasant, clothed all the year in 'beefs' and
homespun, capped with the tuque, girded with the sash, and carrying the
capuchin hood on his shoulders, like the figure on some of our old
copper _sous_;--who sows, after the manner of his fathers, a strip of
the field of his grandfathers, and cherishes to his heart every
prejudice of his several great, great-grandfathers."

"I do not think so," interrupted Chrysler laughing, "I might put you
fifty years behind the age, but no further."

"Yes, but you, sir, have seen us. Why do not more of you come and see?"

"For some of the same reasons perhaps why you do not know us."

Some distance past the Church northward, the village, obscured by the
great, irregularly-occurring pines, takes a turn and a sudden dip. The
dip and the pines, which are thick at that end, obscure a section of the
village known locally as La Reveilliere.

As they came to the high ground where the dip occurs, the vista appeared
below of a spacious avenue, down whose centre ran a straight and smooth
road-bed, and on either side twice its breadth of lawn, rolled and cut,
forming a sort of common, ornamented by a sparing group or two of the
ubiquitous pines of the neighbourhood. Along the edges of this avenue or
common, lay what could only be called a sort of _transfigured
French-Canadian village_, looking, in the quiet light of evening, as if
pictured by some artist out of studies of the places in the country
about. The dwellings were larger, better drawn, their windows, attics
and wings more varied in design, but amid their picturesque variety
could be discerned in several, a suggestion of the chimney of a certain
wild little cot in a dell near the Manoir; in others, of the solid stone
home of Jean Benoit; in many the chalet-eaved pattern of the ordinary
cottage. Perhaps the latter were made prettiest of all--they were at
least the airiest looking. It was in the colors and stainings applied to
the gables and other parts that the greatest care had been taken. These
were selected out of the ordinary red, yellow, white, and sage-green
washes in common use, with such taste as to effect a deeply harmonious
and ideal issue. Again, the plan of the village was peculiar