suspicions of love-making were beginning to
pierce. But he dismissed them as absurd, and added, "However, I'm
willing to forgive, and you've done the forgetting; and all that I ask
now is the pleasure of your company on the spot where Montgomery fell.
Fanny'll never believe I've found it unless you go with me," he
appealed, finally.

"O, we'll go, by all means," said Mr. Arbuton, unconsciously speaking,
as by authority, for both.

They came into busier streets of the Port again, and then passed through
the square of the Lower Town Market, with the market-house in the midst,
the shops and warehouses on either side, the long row of tented booths
with every kind of peasant-wares to sell, and the wide stairway dropping
to the river which brought the abundance of the neighboring country to
the mart. The whole place was alive with country-folk in carts and
citizens on foot. At one point a gayly painted wagon was drawn up in the
midst of a group of people to whom a quackish-faced Yankee was hawking,
in his own personal French, an American patent-medicine, and making his
audience giggle. Because Kitty was amused at this, Mr. Arbuton found it
the drollest thing imaginable, but saw something yet droller when she
made the colonel look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a
basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy, examined as if the
provision were some natural curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered
round.

"It requires a considerable population to make a bargain, up here,"
remarked the colonel. "I suppose they turn out the garrison when they
sell a beef." For both buyer and seller seemed to take advice of the
bystanders, who discussed and inspected the different fowls as if
nothing so novel as poultry had yet fallen in their way.

At last the peasant himself took up the fowls and carefully scrutinized
them.

"_Those_ chickens, it seems, never happened to catch his eye before,"
interpreted Kitty; and Mr. Arbuton, who was usually very restive during
such banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling, or the
most precious wisdom, in the world. He made them wait to see the bargain
out, and could, apparently, have lingered there forever.

But the colonel had a conscience about Montgomery, and he hurried them
away, on past the Queen's Wharf, and down the Cove Road to that point
where the scarped and rugged breast of the cliff bears the sign, "Here
fell Montgomery," though he really fell, not half-way