een copse of balsam trees,
close beside the water. The delightful sense of peace and freedom
descended upon our souls. Prosper and Ovide were cutting wood for the
camp-fire; Francois was getting ready a brace of partridges for supper;
Patrick and I were unpacking the provisions, arranging them conveniently
for present use and future transportation.

"Here, Pat," said I, as my hand fell on a large square parcel--"here is
some superfine tobacco that I got in Quebec for you and the other men on
this trip. Not like the damp stuff you had last year--a little bad
smoke and too many bad words. This is tobacco to burn--something quite
particular, you understand. How does that please you?"

He had been rolling up a piece of salt pork in a cloth as I spoke, and
courteously wiped his fingers on the outside of the bundle before he
stretched out his hand to take the package of tobacco. Then he answered,
with his unfailing politeness, but more solemnly than usual:

"A thousand thanks to m'sieu'. But this year I shall not have need of
the good tobacco. It shall be for the others."

The reply was so unexpected that it almost took my breath away. For Pat,
the steady smoker, whose pipes were as invariable as the precession of
the equinoxes, to refuse his regular rations of the soothing weed was a
thing unheard of. Could he be growing proud in his old age? Had he some
secret supply of cigars concealed in his kit, which made him scorn the
golden Virginia leaf? I demanded an explanation.

"But no, m'sieu'," he replied; "it is not that, most assuredly. It
is something entirely different--something very serious. It is a
reformation that I commence. Does m'sieu' permit that I should inform
him of it?"

Of course I permitted, or rather, warmly encouraged, the fullest
possible unfolding of the tale; and while we sat among the bags and
boxes, and the sun settled gently down behind the sharp-pointed firs
across the lake, and the evening sky and the waveless lake glowed with a
thousand tints of deepening rose and amber, Patrick put me in possession
of the facts which had led to a moral revolution in his life.

"It was the Ma'm'selle Meelair, that young lady,--not very young, but
active like the youngest,--the one that I conducted down the Grande
Decharge to Chicoutimi last year, after you had gone away. She said that
she knew m'sieu' intimately. No doubt you have a good remembrance of
her?"

I admitted an acquaintance with the lady. She wa