never
undertaken actively the work of reform, yet his example of uprightness
and integrity had made an impression upon the community. The people
treated him with unvarying respect and confidence, partly from a sense
of his real superiority, and partly, perhaps, from the very lack of
self-assertion on his side. Consequently without having made the least
effort to do so, he exercised an autocratic power among them.

Mrs. Dubois visited the women of the place frequently, particularly
when the men were absent in their lumbering, or fishing operations,
conversing with them freely, bearing patiently their superstitions and
ignorance, aiding them liberally in temporal things, and sometimes
mingling kindly words of counsel with her gifts.

Adele's intercourse with the settlers was in an altogether different
style. Her manner from earliest childhood, when she first began to
run about from one cottage to another, had been free, frank, and
imperious. Whether it was, that having sniffed from babyhood the fresh
forest air of the new world, its breath had inspired her with a
careless independence not shared by her parents, or, whether the
haughty blood that had flowed far back in the veins of ancestors,
after coursing quietly along the generations, had in her become
stimulated into new activity, certain it is, she had always the
bearing of one having authority and the art of governing seemed
natural to her. It was strange, therefore, that she should have been
such a universal favorite in the neighborhood. But so it was. Those
who habitually set public law at defiance, came readily under the
control of her youthful sway.

Possessing a full share of the irrepressible activity of childhood,
she enacted the part of lady of the Manor, assuming prerogatives that
even her mother did not think of exercising.

When about eleven summers old, she opened one afternoon the door of an
Irish cabin and received at once a cordial, noisy welcome from its
inmates. She did not however, make an immediate response, for she had
begun taking a minute survey of the not over-nice premises. At length
she deigned to speak.

"Bridget Malone, are you not ashamed to have such a disorderly house
as this? Why don't you sweep the floor and put things in place?"

"Och! hinny, and how can I swape the floor without a brum?" said
Bridget, looking up in some dismay.

"Didn't my father order James to give you a broom whenever you want
one? Here Pat", said she, to