going to marry Norinne on New
Year's Day," he said. "Bagosh, poor Norinne!" said Medallion, in a queer
sort of tone. "It is the way of the world," he added. "I'll wait for
Marie myself."

It looks as if he meant to, for she has no better friend. He talks to
her much of Gal Bargon; of which her mother is glad.

A WORKER IN STONE

At the beginning he was only a tombstone-cutter. His name was Francois
Lagarre. He was but twenty years old when he stepped into the shop where
the old tombstone-cutter had worked for forty years. Picking up the
hammer and chisel which the old man had dropped when he fell dead at the
end of a long hot day's labour, he finished the half-carved tombstone,
and gave the price of it to the widow. Then, going to the Seigneur and
Cure, he asked them to buy the shop and tools for him, and let him pay
rent until he could take the place off their hands.

They did as he asked, and in two years he had bought and paid for the
place, and had a few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a
small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day.
It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an
heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on
the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none,
and they asked Francois to supply them--as though he kept them in stock
like marble and sand-paper. He had no collection of suitable epitaphs,
and, besides, he did not know whether it was right to use them. Like all
his race in New France he was jealous of any inroads of Protestantism,
or what the Little Chemist called "Englishness." The good M. Fabre,
the Cure, saw no harm in it, but said he could not speak for any one's
grief. What the bereaved folk felt they themselves must put in words
upon the stone. But still Francois might bring all the epitaphs to him
before they were carved, and he would approve or disapprove, correct or
reject, as the case might be.

At first he rejected many, for they were mostly conventional couplets,
taken unknowingly from Protestant sources by mourning Catholics. But
presently all that was changed, and the Cure one day had laid before him
three epitaphs, each of which left his hand unrevised and untouched; and
when he passed them back to Francois his eyes were moist, for he was a
man truly after God's own heart, and full of humanity.

"Will you read them to me, Francois?" he said, as the worke