d again touched the box and no evil had
resulted.

"Why didn't you bury him at home?" asked the boy. "He was English."

"Mr. Bates has strict ideas, though he is English. He wanted it done
proper, in a graveyard, by a minister. He has wrote to the minister at
St. Hennon's and sent money for the burying--Mr. Bates, he is always
particular."

"You are not going to St. Hennon's?" said the boy incredulously. "I'll
stay to-night at Turrifs, and go on in the morning. It's four days' walk
for me and the cattle to go and come, but I shall take back a man to cut
the trees."

"Why not send him by the new railroad?"

"It does not stop at Turrifs."

"Yes; they stop at the cross-roads now, not more than three miles from
Turrifs, There's a new station, and an Englishman set to keep it. I've
just brought this sack of flour from there. M. Didier had it come by the
cars."

"When do they pass to St. Hennon's?" asked Saul meditatively,--"But
anyway, the Englishman wouldn't like to take in a coffin."

"They pass some time in the night; and he must take it in if you write
on it where it's going. It's not his business to say what the cars will
take, if you pay."

"Well," said Saul. "Good-day. Yo-hoist! Yo, yo, ho-hoist!"

It did not seem to him necessary to state whether he was, or was not,
going to take the advice offered. The straining and creaking of the
cart, his shouts to the oxen, would have obliterated any further query
the boy might have made. He had fairly moved off when the boy also took
up his burden and trudged on the other way.

CHAPTER VIII.

When the blueberry bushes are dry, all the life in them, sucked into
their roots against another summer, the tops turn a rich, brownish red;
at this time, also, wild bramble thickets have many a crimson stalk that
gives colour to their mass, and the twigs that rise above the white
trunks of birch trees are not grey, but brown.

Round the new railway station at the cross-roads near Turrifs
Settlement, the low-lying land, for miles and miles, was covered with,
blueberry bushes; bramble thickets were here and there; and where the
land rose a little, in irregular places, young birch woods stood. If the
snow had sprinkled here, as it had upon the hills the night before,
there was no sign of it now. The warm colour of the land seemed to glow
against the dulness of the afternoon, not with the sparkle and
brightness which colour has in sunshine, but with the glow of a slee