rying to patch the machinery so as to grind the devil's grist. It
directed the dance of black cats in the mill at Pont Rouge, after the
widow's curse had fallen on Louis Robert, her brother-in-law. This man,
succeeding her husband as director of the property, had developed such
miserly traits that she and her children were literally starved to death,
but her dying curse threw such ill luck on the place and set afloat such
evil report about it that he took himself away. The Nain Rouge may have
been the Lutin that took Jacques L'Esperance's ponies from the stable at
Grosse Pointe, and, leaving no tracks in sand or snow, rode them through
the air all night, restoring them at dawn quivering with fatigue, covered
with foam, bloody with the lash of a thorn-bush. It stopped that exercise
on the night that Jacques hurled a font of holy water at it, but to keep
it away the people of Grosse Pointe still mark their houses with the sign
of a cross.

It was lurking in the wood on the day that Captain Dalzell went against
Pontiac, only to perish in an ambush, to the secret relief of his
superior, Major Gladwyn, for the major hoped to win the betrothed of
Dalzell; but when the girl heard that her lover had been killed at Bloody
Run, and his head had been carried on a pike, she sank to the ground
never to rise again in health, and in a few days she had followed the
victims of the massacre. There was a suspicion that the Nain Rouge had
power to change his shape for one not less offensive. The brothers
Tremblay had no luck in fishing through the straits and lakes until one
of them agreed to share his catch with St. Patrick, the saint's half to
be sold at the church-door for the benefit of the poor and for buying
masses to relieve souls in purgatory. His brother doubted if this benefit
would last, and feared that they might be lured into the water and turned
into fish, for had not St. Patrick eaten pork chops on a Friday, after
dipping them into holy water and turning them into trout? But his good
brother kept on and prospered and the bad one kept on grumbling. Now, at
Grosse Isle was a strange thing called the rolling muff, that all were
afraid of, since to meet it was a warning of trouble; but, like the _feu
follet_, it could be driven off by holding a cross toward it or by asking
it on what day of the month came Christmas. The worse of the Tremblays
encountered this creature and it filled him with dismay. When he returned
his neighbors