. The
man sat down on the threshold and strained the child to his breast. He
remembered how near he had been to disregarding the far-off cries, and
great beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead.

Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following the fresh trail of a
bear which had killed his sheep. The trail led him at last along the
slope of a deep ravine, from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollen
and obstructed stream. In the ravine he found a shallow cave, behind a
great white rock. The cave was plainly a wild beast's lair, and he
entered circumspectly. There were bones scattered about, and on some dry
herbage in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead bodies, now
rapidly decaying, of two small panther cubs.

The Perdu.

To the passing stranger there was nothing mysterious about it except the
eternal mystery of beauty. To the scattered folk, however, who lived
their even lives within its neighborhood, it was an object of dim
significance and dread.

At first sight it seemed to be but a narrow, tideless, windless bit of
backwater; and the first impulse of the passing stranger was to ask how
it came to be called the "Perdu." On this point he would get little
information from the folk of the neighborhood, who knew not French. But
if he were to translate the term for their better information, they
would show themselves impressed by a sense of its occult
appropriateness.

The whole neighborhood was one wherein the strange and the
not-to-be-understood might feel at home. It was a place where the
unusual was not felt to be impossible. Its peace was the peace of one
entranced. To its expectancy a god might come, or a monster, or nothing
more than the realization of eventless weariness.

Only four or five miles away, across the silent, bright meadows and
beyond a softly swelling range of pastured hills, swept the great river,
a busy artery of trade.

On the river were all the modern noises, and with its current flowed the
stream of modern ideas. Within sight of the river a mystery, or anything
uninvestigated, or aught unamenable to the spirit of the age, would have
seemed an anachronism. But back here, among the tall wild-parsnip tops
and the never-stirring clumps of orange lilies, life was different, and
dreams seemed likely to come true.

The Perdu lay perpetually asleep, along beside a steep bank clothed with
white birches and balsam poplars. Amid the trunks of the trees grew
elder shru