d clearness
the old Latin grace, "Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona,"
sanctifying her table by the invocation of the blessing of God upon it
and upon all who sat round it.

A soup, rich and savory, was the prelude at all dinners in New France.
A salmon speared in the shallows of the Chaudiere, and a dish of
blood-speckled trout from the mountain streams of St. Joachim, smoked
upon the board. Little oval loaves of wheaten bread were piled up in
baskets of silver filigree. For in those days the fields of New France
produced crops of the finest wheat--a gift which Providence has since
withheld. "The wheat went away with the Bourbon lilies, and never grew
afterwards," said the old habitans. The meat in the larder had all
really been given to the hungry censitaires in the kitchen, except a
capon from the basse cour of Tilly and a standing pie, the contents of
which came from the manorial dovecote. A reef of raspberries, red as
corals, gathered on the tangled slopes of Cote a Bonhomme, formed the
dessert, with blue whortleberries from Cape Tourment, plums sweet as
honey drops, and small, gray-coated apples from Beaupre, delicious as
those that comforted the Rose of Sharon. A few carafes of choice wine
from the old manorial cellar, completed the entertainment.

The meal was not a protracted one, but to Pierre Philibert the most
blissful hour of his life. He sat by the side of Amelie, enjoying every
moment as if it were a pearl dropped into his bosom by word, look, or
gesture of the radiant girl who sat beside him.

He found Amelie, although somewhat timid at first to converse, a
willing, nay, an eager listener. She was attracted by the magnetism of
a noble, sympathetic nature, and by degrees ventured to cast a glance
at the handsome, manly countenance where feature after feature revealed
itself, like a landscape at dawn of day, and in Colonel Philibert she
recognized the very looks, speech, and manner of Pierre Philibert of
old.

Her questioning eyes hardly needed the interpretation of her tongue to
draw him out to impart the story of his life during his long absence
from New France, and it was with secret delight she found in him a
powerful, cultivated intellect and nobility of sentiment such as
she rightly supposed belonged only to a great man, while his visible
pleasure at meeting her again filled her with a secret joy that,
unnoticed by herself, suffused her whole countenance with radiance, and
incited her to conv