e lady came to our rough Habitation!

I mind the first Sunday M. Radisson led her out like a queen to the
mess-room table. When our voyageurs went upstream for M. Picot's
hidden furs, her story had got noised about the fort. Officers,
soldiers, and sailors had seated themselves at the long benches on
either side the table; but M. Radisson's place was empty and a sort of
throne chair had been extemporized at the head of the table. An angry
question went from group to group to know if M. Radisson designed such
place of honour for the two leaders of our prisoners--under lock in the
guard-room. M. de Groseillers only laughed and bade the fellows
contain their souls and stomachs in patience. A moment later, the door
to the quarters where Hortense lived was thrown open by a red-coated
soldier, and out stepped M. Radisson leading Hortense by the tips of
her dainty fingers, the ebon faces of the two blackamoors grinning
delight behind.

You could have heard a pin fall among our fellows. Then there was a
noise of armour clanking to the floor. Every man unconsciously took to
throwing his pistol under the table, flinging sword-belt down and
hiding daggers below benches. Of a sudden, the surprise went to their
heads.

"Gentlemen," began M. Radisson.

But the fellows would have none of his grand speeches. With a cheer
that set the rafters ringing, they were on their feet; and to Mistress
Hortense's face came a look that does more for the making of men than
all New England's laws or my uncle's blasphemy boxes or King Charles's
dragoons. You ask what that look was? Go to, with your teasings! A
lover is not to be asked his whys! I ask you in return why you like
the spire of a cathedral pointing up instead of down; or why the muses
lift souls heavenward? Indeed, of all the fine arts granted the human
race to lead men's thoughts above the sordid brutalities of living,
methinks woman is the finest; for God's own hand fashioned her, and she
was the last crowning piece of all His week's doings. The finest arts
are the easiest spoiled, as you know very well; and if you demand how
Mistress Hortense could escape harm amid all the wickedness of that
wilderness, I answer it is a thing that your townsfolk cannot know.

It is of the wilderness.

The wilderness is a foster-mother that teacheth hard, strange
paradoxes. The first is _the sin of being weak_; and the second is
that _death is the least of life's harms_.

Wrapp