t the
very sunniness of their owner's soul. There was not a severe nor yet
a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily
dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson's
Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of
Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of a long
census-taking.

As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth
he had studied Indian archaeology and folk-lore, as a man he
consummated his predilections for Indianology, by loving, winning
and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who
himself had married a native woman twenty years ago. The country was
all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance
of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman's heart had gone
out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of
English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal
that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the
higher tribes of North American Indians.

Like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of
ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in
mental and social habits, she had developed from absolute pagan
indifference into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken
English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored face, were
the joy of old Robinson's declining years.

He had given their daughter Christine all the advantages of his own
learning--which, if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl
had a fair common education, and the native adaptability to
progress.

She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured
Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so
commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the
other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life would find it
difficult to determine her nationality.

She looked very pretty to Charles McDonald's loving eyes, as she
reappeared in the doorway, holding her mother's hand and saying some
happy words of farewell. Personally she looked much the same as her
sisters, all Canada through, who are the offspring of red and white
parentage--olive-complexioned, gray-eyed, black-haired, with figure
slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable expression in her
whole face that turns one so heart-sick as they glance at the young
Indians of to-day--it is the forerunner too frequently of "the w