annikin, served for beer and wine; pork was the _piece de
resistance_, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a
Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an
occasional remark in Irish or Scottish brogue.

'Your men seem to be temperance folk,' observed Argent to the foreman.

'Weel, they must be,' was the laconic reply. 'We've no stores where they
could get brandy-smash in the bush, and it's so much the better for
them, or I daursay they wad want prisons and juries next. As it is,
they're weel behaved lads eneugh.'

'I'm sure it must be good in a moral point of view; but do you find them
equal to as much work as if they had beer or spirits?' asked Captain
Argent. 'And lumbering seems to me to be particularly laborious.'

'Weel, there's a fact I'll mak a present to the teetotallers,' answered
the foreman. 'Our lumberers get nothing in the way of stimulant, and
they don't seem to want it. When I came fresh from the auld country, I
couldna hardly b'lieve that.'

'Au large, au large!'

At this word of command all hands turned out of the shanty, and went
back to work in their several gangs. Again the fellers attacked the
hugest pines; the hewers sprang upon the fallen, lining and squaring
the living trees into dead beams; and the teamsters yoked afresh their
patient oxen, fitting upon each massive throat the heavy wooden collar,
and attaching to chains the ponderous log which should be moved towards
the water highway.

Argent and Arthur found themselves presently at the foot of a colossal
Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as
disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the
Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the
abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the
shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception
upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that
it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre in the neighbourhood
might travel easily and safely to the water's edge; and forty yards of
bedding timbers lay a ready-made couch, for its great length.

'I daursay now, that stick's standing aboot a thousand years: I've
counted fourteen hunder rings in the wood of a pine no much bigger. Ou,
'twill mak a gran' mast for a seventy-four--nigh a hunder feet lang,
and as straight as a rod.'

Stripping off the bark and dressing the knots was the next w