hese cries with greater vehemence.

"Now, Richard," implored his wife, "you're _not_ going to let those
little pests go through all that shooting performance again?"

"I must. It is expected of me whenever I come to Lorette; and I would
never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind." The
colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm
of arrows hurtled around it. Presently it flew into the air, and a
fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding
coins.

"There's an aborigine of pure blood," remarked the colonel; "his
ancestors came from Normandy two hundred years ago. That's the reason he
uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors."

They went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient
church burnt not long ago. It is small, and it is bare and rude inside,
with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of
which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a
priest,--slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much
for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at Lorette in incurable
squalor and wildness. They are Christians after their fashion, this poor
remnant of the mighty Huron nation converted by the Jesuits and crushed
by the Iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at
heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of
wolves and foxes. They followed their visitors into the church, where
there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a
votive hand and foot, and a few young Huron suppliants with very sleek
hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers,
and now at the wooden effigy of the House of St. Ann borne by two gilt
angels above the high-altar. There was no service, and the visitors soon
quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. Some young
girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road
with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect
upon spectators.

From one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a
figure of aggressive fashion,--a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy
black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked
trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned
across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane.

"That is the son of the