, across the
river, where Ingolby lived, was modern from the day the first shack was
thrown up.

Manitou showed itself antagonistic to progress; it was old-fashioned,
and primitively agricultural. It looked with suspicion on the factories
built after Ingolby came and on the mining propositions, which circled
the place with speculation. Unlike other towns of the West, it was
insanitary and uneducated; it was also given to nepotism and a primitive
kind of jobbery; but, on the whole, it was honest. It was a settlement
twenty years before Lebanon had a house, though the latter exceeded
the population of Manitou in five years, and became the home of all
adventuring spirits--land agents, company promoters, mining prospectors,
railway men, politicians, saloon keepers, and up to-date dissenting
preachers. Manitou was, however, full of back-water people, religious
fanatics, little farmers, guides, trappers, old coureurs-de-bois,
Hudson's Bay Company factors and ex-factors, half-breeds; and all the
rest.

The real feud between the two towns began about the time of the arrival
of Gabriel Druse, his daughter, and Madame Bulteel, the woman in black,
and it had grown with great rapidity and increasing intensity. Manitou
condemned the sacrilegiousness of the Protestants, whose meeting-houses
were used for "socials," "tea-meetings," "strawberry festivals," and
entertainments of many kinds; while comic songs were sung at the table
where the solemn Love Feast was held at the quarterly meetings. At last
when attempts were made to elect to Parliament an Irish lawyer who added
to his impecuniousness, eloquence, a half-finished University education,
and an Orangeman's prejudices of the best brand of Belfast or Derry,
inter-civic strife took the form of physical violence. The great bridge
built by Ingolby between the two towns might have been ten thousand
yards long, so deep was the estrangement between the two places. They
had only one thing in common--a curious compromise--in the person of
Nathan Rockwell, an agnostic doctor, who had arrived in Lebanon with a
reputation for morality somewhat clouded; though, where his patients in
Manitou and Lebanon were concerned, he had been the "pink of propriety."

Rockwell had arrived in Lebanon early in its career, and had remained
unimportant until a railway accident occurred at Manitou and the
resident doctors were driven from the field of battle, one by death,
and one by illness. Then it was tha