to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung
that the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of water-growths bordered
it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with
the ruin of the chateau in the midst.

The pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene; for here were evidences
of gardens and bowery aisles in other times, and now, for many a year,
desolation and the slow return of the wilderness. The mountain rising
behind the chateau grounds showed the dying flush of the deciduous
leaves among the dark green of the pines that clothed it to the crest; a
cry of innumerable crickets filled the ear of the dreaming noon.

The ruin itself is not of impressive size, and it is a chateau by grace
of the popular fancy rather than through any right of its own; for it
was, in truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the king's
Intendant, Bigot, a man whose sins claim for him a lordly consideration
in the history of Quebec, He was the last Intendant before the British
conquest, and in that time of general distress he grew rich by
oppression of the citizens, and by peculation from the soldiers. He
built this pleasure-house here in the woods, and hither he rode out from
Quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the carouses that succeed the
chase. Here, too, it is said, dwelt in secret the Huron girl who loved
him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants as the murdered
_sauragesse_; and, indeed, there is as much proof that she was murdered
as that she ever lived. When the wicked Bigot was arrested and sent to
France, where he was tried with great result of documentary record, his
chateau fell into other hands; at last a party of Arnold's men wintered
there in 1775, and it is to our own countrymen that we owe the
conflagration and the ruin of Chateau-Bigot. It stands, as I said, in
the middle of that open place, with the two gable walls and the stone
partition-wall still almost entire, and that day showing very
effectively against the tender northern sky. On the most weatherward
gable the iron in the stone had shed a dark red stain under the lash of
many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the
surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of
all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to
pity and soften the forlornness of decay. Out of the rubbish at the foot
of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of s