Indians silently pushed their canoe into the stream, and, embarking,
returned to the city by the way they came.

A fine breezy upland lay before Fanchon Dodier. Cultivated fields
of corn, and meadows ran down to the shore. A row of white cottages,
forming a loosely connected street, clustered into something like a
village at the point where the parish church stood, at the intersection
of two or three roads, one of which, a narrow green track, but little
worn by the carts of the habitans, led to the stone house of La
Corriveau, the chimney of which was just visible as you lost sight of
the village spire.

In a deep hollow, out of sight of the village church, almost out of
hearing of its little bell, stood the house of La Corriveau, a square,
heavy structure of stone, inconvenient and gloomy, with narrow windows
and an uninviting door. The pine forest touched it on one side, a
brawling stream twisted itself like a live snake half round it on the
other. A plot of green grass, ill kept and deformed, with noxious weeds,
dock, fennel, thistle, and foul stramonium, was surrounded by a rough
wall of loose stones, forming the lawn, such as it was, where, under
a tree, seated in an armchair, was a solitary woman, whom Fanchon
recognized as her aunt, Marie Josephte Dodier, surnamed La Corriveau.

La Corriveau, in feature and person, took after her grand-sire Exili.
She was tall and straight, of a swarthy complexion, black-haired, and
intensely black-eyed. She was not uncomely of feature, nay, had been
handsome, nor was her look at first sight forbidding, especially if she
did not turn upon you those small basilisk eyes of hers, full of fire
and glare as the eyes of a rattlesnake. But truly those thin, cruel lips
of hers never smiled spontaneously, or affected to smile upon you unless
she had an object to gain by assuming a disguise as foreign to her as
light to an angel of darkness.

La Corriveau was dressed in a robe of soft brown stuff, shaped with
a degree of taste and style beyond the garb of her class. Neatness in
dress was the one virtue she had inherited from her mother. Her feet
were small and well-shod, like a lady's, as the envious neighbors used
to say. She never in her life would wear the sabots of the peasant
women, nor go barefoot, as many of them did, about the house. La
Corriveau was vain of her feet, which would have made her fortune, as
she thought with bitterness, anywhere but in St. Valier.

She sat musin