r guns and powder for the purpose of firing salutes to Frontenac.
It was a grand day. But when Gaspard stepped out with the rest, his
countenance fell. He could not tell what ailed him. His friends coaxed
and pulled him; they gave him a little brandy. He sat down, and they
were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks
themselves. From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion's, ship
come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man
need not leave his place to take part in the world.

Frontenac had not been back a month, and here was the New England
colony of Massachusetts swarming against New France. "They may carry
me away from my hearth feet first," thought Gaspard, "but I am not to
be scared away from it."

Every night, before putting the bar across his door, the old habitant
went out to survey the two ends of the earth typified by the road
crossing his strip of farm. These were usually good moments for him.
He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve
him of labor. A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow
of Beauport. The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste.
Anne de Beaupre, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine
in New France. The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed
the long slope to Quebec rock.

Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk.
Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and
calf. To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual.
He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth
as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in
the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.

Gaspard clapped the house door to behind him and put up the bar. He
was not afraid of Phips and the fleet, of battle or night attack, but
the terror which walked in the darkness of sorcerers' times abjectly
bowed his old legs.

"O good Ste. Anne, pray for us!" he whispered, using an invocation
familiar to his lips. "If loups-garous are abroad, also, what is to
become of this unhappy land?"

There was a rattling knock on his door. It might be made by the
hilt of a sword; or did a loup-garou ever clatter paw against man's
dwelling? Gaspard climbed on his bed.

"Father Gaspard! Father Gaspard! Are you within?"

"Who is there?"

"Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene. Don't you know my voic