o Quebec, and sailing for
Europe, and having his children join him there. They could sell the
place at Hatboro', and with what it brought, and with what he had, they
could live comfortably in some cheap country which had no extradition
treaty with the United States. He remembered reading of a defaulter who
went to a little republic called San Marino, somewhere in Italy, and was
safe there; he found the President treading his own grape vats; and it
cost nothing to live there, though it was dull, and the exile became so
homesick that he returned and gave himself up. He wondered that he had
not thought of that place before; then he reflected that no ships could
make their way from Quebec to the sea before May, at the earliest. He
would be arrested if he left any American port, or arrested as soon as
he reached England. He remembered the advertisement of a line of
steamships between Quebec and Brazil; he must wait for the St. Lawrence
to open, and go to Brazil, and in the morning must go back to Quebec.

But in the morning he felt so much better that he decided to keep on to
Chicoutimi. He could not bear the thought of being found out by
detectives at Quebec, and by reporters who would fill the press with
paragraphs about him. He must die to the world, to his family, before he
could hope to revisit either.

The morning was brilliant with sunlight, and the glare of the snow hurt
his eyes. He went to the store to get some glasses to protect them, and
he bought some laudanum to make him sleep that night, if he should be
wakeful again. It was sixty miles to Haha Bay, but the road on the
frozen river was good, and he could do a long stretch of it. From
Riviere Marguerite, he should travel on the ice of the Saguenay, and the
going would be smooth and easy.

All the landscape seemed dwarfed since he saw it in that far-off summer.
The tops of the interminable solitudes that walled the river in on both
sides appeared lower, as if the snow upon them weighed them down, but
doubtless they had grown beyond their real height in his memory. They
had lost the mystery of the summer aspect when they were dimmed with
rain or swathed in mist; all their outlines were in plain sight, and the
forests that clothed them from the shore to their summits were not that
unbroken gloom which they had seemed. The snow shone through their
stems, and the inky river at their feet lay a motionless extent of
white. As his carriole slipped lightly over it, No