or given it the same treatment. Also it may be
said, as the Saturday Review remarked, that it contained one whole, new
idea, and that was the pathetic--unutterably pathetic--incident of a man
driven by the truth in his blood to impersonate himself.

"Oh, withered is the garland of the war,
The Soldier's pole is fallen."

WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC

CHAPTER I

On one corner stood the house of Monsieur Garon the avocat; on another,
the shop of the Little Chemist; on another, the office of Medallion
the auctioneer; and on the last, the Hotel Louis Quinze. The chief
characteristics of Monsieur Garon's house were its brass door-knobs, and
the verdant vines that climbed its sides; of the Little Chemist's shop,
the perfect whiteness of the building, the rolls of sober wall-paper,
and the bottles of coloured water in the shop windows; of Medallion's,
the stoop that surrounded three sides of the building, and the notices
of sales tacked up, pasted up, on the front; of the Hotel Louis Quinze,
the deep dormer windows, the solid timbers, and the veranda that gave
its front distinction--for this veranda had been the pride of several
generations of landlords, and its heavy carving and bulky grace were
worth even more admiration than Pontiac gave to it.

The square which the two roads and the four corners made was, on
week-days, the rendezvous of Pontiac, and the whole parish; on Sunday
mornings the rendezvous was shifted to the large church on the hill,
beside which was the house of the Cure, Monsieur Fabre. Travelling
towards the south, out of the silken haze of a mid-summer day, you would
come in time to the hills of Maine; north, to the city of Quebec and the
river St. Lawrence; east, to the ocean; and west, to the Great Lakes and
the land of the English. Over this bright province Britain raised her
flag, but only Medallion and a few others loved it for its own sake, or
saluted it in the English tongue.

In the drab velvety dust of these four corners, were gathered, one night
of July a generation ago, the children of the village and many of their
elders. All the events of that epoch were dated from the evening of this
particular day. Another day of note the parish cherished, but it was
merely a grave fulfilment of the first.

Upon the veranda-stoop of the Louis Quinze stood a man of apparently
about twenty-eight years of age. When you came to study him closely,
some sense of time and experience