oo late," Pierre added.
He knelt down, with light fingers opened the child's mouth, and poured
the medicine in slowly. The old man stood for a time rigid, looking
at them both. Then he came round to the other side of the cradle, and
seated himself beside it, his eyes fixed on the child's face. For a long
time they sat there. At last the old man said: "Will he die, Pierre?"

"I am afraid so," answered Pierre painfully. "But we shall see." Then
early teaching came to him, never to be entirely obliterated, and he
added: "Has the child been baptised?"

The old man shook his head. "'Will you do it?" asked Pierre
hesitatingly.

"I can't--I can't," was the reply.

Pierre smiled a little ironically, as if at himself, got some water in a
cup, came over, and said: "Remember, I'm a Papist!"

A motion of the hand answered him.

He dipped his fingers in the water, and dropped it ever so lightly on
the child's forehead.

"George Magor,"--it was the old man's name,--"I baptise thee in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen." Then he
drew the sign of the cross on the infant's forehead.

Sitting down, he watched beside the child. After a little he heard a
long choking sigh. Looking up, he saw tears slowly dropping from Magor's
eyes.

And to this day the child and the mother of the child are dear to the
old man's heart.

THE BRIDGE HOUSE

It stood on a wide wall between two small bridges. These were approaches
to the big covered bridge spanning the main channel of the Madawaska
River, and when swelled by the spring thaws and rains, the two flanking
channels divided at the foundations of the house, and rustled away
through the narrow paths of the small bridges to the rapids. You could
stand at any window in the House and watch the ugly, rushing current,
gorged with logs, come battering at the wall, jostle between the piers,
and race on to the rocks and the dam and the slide beyond. You stepped
from the front door upon the wall, which was a road between the bridges,
and from the back door into the river itself.

The House had once been a tavern. It looked a wayfarer, like its patrons
the river-drivers, with whom it was most popular. You felt that it had
no part in the career of the village on either side, but was like a rock
in a channel, at which a swimmer caught or a vagrant fish loitered.

Pierre knew the place, when, of a night in the springtime or early
summer, throngs of river-drive