ay; he had an excellent supper and an easy bed;
but he slept brokenly, and he was awake long before the early breakfast
which he had ordered for his start next day. The landlord wished to
persuade him that there was no need of such great haste; it was only
eighteen miles to St. Joachim, where he was to make his first stop, and
the road was so good that he would get there in a few hours. He had
better stop and visit the church, and see the sick people's offerings,
which they left there every year, in gratitude to the saint for healing
them of their maladies. The landlord said it was a pity he could not
come some time at the season of the pilgrimage; his countrymen often
came then. Northwick perceived that in spite of his fur cap and
overcoat, and his great Canadian boots, he was easily recognizable for
an American to this man, though he could not definitely decide whether
his landlord was French or Irish, and could not tell whether it was in
earnest or in irony that he invited him to try St. Anne for any trouble
he happened to be suffering from. But he winced at the suggestion, while
his heart leaped at the fantastic thought of hanging that money-belt at
her altar, and so easing himself of all his pains. He grotesquely
imagined the American defaulters in Canada making a pilgrimage to St.
Anne, and devoting emblems of their moral disease to her: forged notes,
bewitched accounts, false statements. At the same time, with that part
of him which seemed obedient, he asked the landlord if he knew of the
gold discoveries on the Chicoutimi River, and tried to account for
himself as an American speculator going to look into the matter in his
own way and at his own time.

In spite of his uncertainty about the landlord in some ways, Northwick
found him a kindly young fellow. He treated Northwick with a young
fellow's comfortable deference for an elderly man, and helped him forget
the hurts to his respectability which rankled so when he remembered
them. He explained the difference between the two routes from Malbaie
on, and advised him to take the longer, which lay through a more settled
district, where he would be safer in case of any mischance. But if he
liked to take the shorter, he told him there were good _campes_, or
log-house stations, every ten or fifteen miles, where he would find
excellent meals and beds, and be well cared for by people who kept them
in the winter for travellers. Ladies sometimes made the journey on that
ro