ed crown against
the island's back of evergreens.

Both Honore and Clethera knew there was a Spanish war. As summer day
followed summer day, the village seethed with it, as other spots then
seethed. A military post, even when dismantled, always brings home to
the community where it is situated the dignity and pomp of arms. Young
men enlisted, and Honore restlessly followed, with a friend from the
North Shore, to look at the camp. His pulses beat with the drums. But
he was carrying the burden of the family; to leave Jules and Jules's
dependent wife would be deserting infants.

Clethera gave little more thought to fleets sailing tropical seas than
to La Salle's vanished _Griffin_ on Northern waters. It was nothing to
her, for she had never heard of it, that pioneers of her father's
blood once trod that island, and lifted up the cross at St. Ignace, and
planted outposts along the South Shore. Bareheaded, or with a crimson
kerchief bound about her hair, she loved to help her grandmother spread
the white clothes to bleach, or to be seen and respected as a prosperous
laundress carrying her basket through the teeming streets. The island
was her world. Its crowds in summer brought variety enough; and its
virgin winter snows, the dog-sledges, the ice-boats, were month by month
a procession of joys.

Clethera wondered that Honore persistently went where newspapers were
read and discussed. He stuffed them in his pockets, and pored over them
while waiting in his boat beside the wharf. People would fight out that
war with Spain. What thrilled her was the boom of winter surf, piling
iridescent frozen spume as high as a man's head, and rimming the
island in a corona of shattered rainbows. And she had an eye for summer
lightning infusing itself through sheets of water as if descending in
the downpour, glorifying for one instant every distinct drop.

The pair sitting with the broad top step betwixt them exchanged the
smiling good-will of youth.

"I take some more party out to-night for de light-moon sail," said
Honore, pleased to report his prosperity. "It is consider' gran' to sail
in de light-moon."

"Did you find de hot fish pie?" inquired Clethera, solicitous about man
thrown on his own resources as cook.

Honore acknowledged with hearty gratitude the supper which Melinda Cree
had baked and her granddaughter had carried into the bereaved house
while its inmates were out.

"They not get fish pie like that in de war. Jules,