swer in
her world. It was anguish to look into the faces of her kindred and
friends as into the faces of hounds who live, it is true, but a lower
life, made up of chasing and eating. She wondered why she was created
different from them. A loyalty of race constrained her sometimes to
imitate them; but it was imitation; she could not be a savage. Then
Father Petit came, preceding Saint-Castin, and set up his altar and
built his chapel. The Abenaqui girl was converted as soon as she
looked in at the door and saw the gracious image of Mary lifted up to
be her pattern of womanhood. Those silent and terrible days, when she
lost interest in the bustle of living, and felt an awful homesickness
for some unknown good, passed entirely away. Religion opened an
invisible world. She sprang toward it, lying on the wings of her
spirit and gazing forever above. The minutest observances of the
Church were learned with an exactness which delighted a priest who had
not too many encouragements. Finally, she begged her father to let
her make a winter retreat to some place near the headwaters of the
Penobscot. When the hunters were abroad, it did them no harm to
remember there was a maid in a wilderness cloister praying for the
good of her people; and when they were fortunate, they believed in the
material advantage of her prayers. Nobody thought of searching out her
hidden cell, or of asking the big-legged hunter and his wife to tell
its mysteries. The dealer with invisible spirits commanded respect in
Indian minds before the priest came.

Madockawando's daughter was of a lighter color than most of her tribe,
and finer in her proportions, though they were a well-made people. She
was the highest expression of unadulterated Abenaqui blood. She set
her sap pail down by the trough, and Saint-Castin shifted silently to
watch her while she dipped the juice. Her eyelids were lowered. She
had well-marked brows, and the high cheek-bones were lost in a general
acquiline rosiness. It was a girl's face, modest and sweet, that he
saw; reflecting the society of holier beings than the one behind the
tree. She had no blemish of sunken temples or shrunk features, or the
glaring aspect of a devotee. Saint-Castin was a good Catholic, but he
did not like fanatics. It was as if the choicest tree in the forest
had been flung open, and a perfect woman had stepped out, whom no
other man's eye had seen. Her throat was round, and at the base of it,
in the little hol