ement at the woodsman's eye
that found and followed the crystal paths through the waste of foam....
There were long, quiet stretches, hemmed in by alders, where the canoes,
dodging the fallen trees, glided through the still water... No such
silent, exhilarating motion Janet had ever known. Even the dipping
paddles made no noise, though sometimes there was a gurgle, as though a
fish had broken the water behind them; sometimes, in the shining pools
ahead, she saw the trout leap out. At every startling flop Delphin would
exclaim: "Un gros!" From an upper branch of a spruce a kingfisher darted
like an arrow into the water, making a splash like a falling stone. Once,
after they had passed through the breach of a beaver dam, Herve nodded
his head toward a mound of twigs by the bank and muttered something.
Augusta Maturin laughed.

"Cabane de castor, he says--a beaver cabin. And the beavers made the dam
we just passed. Did you notice, Janet, how beautifully clean those logs
had been cut by their sharp teeth?"

At moments she conversed rapidly with Delphin in the same patois Janet
had heard on the streets of Hampton. How long ago that seemed!

On two occasions, when the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and
walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The prints
of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused
to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing
waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with
suddenly widened vision beheld the lake's sapphire expanse and the
distant circle of hills. "Les montagnes," Herve called them as he flung
out his pipe, and this Janet could translate for herself. Eastward they
lay lucent in the afternoon light; westward, behind the generous log camp
standing on a natural terrace above the landing, they were in shadow.
Here indeed seemed peace, if remoteness, if nature herself might bestow
it.

Janet little suspected that special preparations had been made for her
comfort. Early in April, while the wilderness was still in the grip of
winter, Delphin had been summoned from a far-away lumber camp to Saint
Hubert, where several packing-cases and two rolls of lead pipe from
Montreal lay in a shed beside the railroad siding. He had superintended
the transportation of these, on dog sledges, up the frozen decharge,
accompanied on his last trip by a plumber of sorts from Beaupre, thirty
miles down the line; and betw