ies
sprawled in play upon the ashes of last winter's fires. Van Corlaer's
men sauntered through the vanishing town, trying at times to strike some
spark of information from Dutch and Etchemin jargon.

Near the river bank, between camp and fort, was an alluvial spot in
which the shovel found no rock. A rough line of piled stones severed it
from surrounding lands, and a few trees stood there, promising summer
shade, though, darkly moist along every budded twig, they now swayed in
tuneless nakedness. Here the dead of Fort St. John were buried; and
those approaching figures entered a gap of the inclosure instead of
going on to the camp. Three of La Tour's soldiers, with Father Jogues
and his donne, had come to bury the outcast baby. One of the men was
Zelie's husband, and she walked beside him. Marguerite lay sulking in
the barracks. The lady had asked Father Jogues to consecrate with the
rites of his church the burial of this little victim probably born into
his faith. But he would have followed it in any case, with that instinct
which drove him to baptize dying Indian children with rain-drops and
attempt to pluck converts from the tortures of the stake.

"Has this child been baptized?" he inquired of Zelie on the path down
from the fort.

She answered, shedding tears of resentment against Marguerite, and with
fervor she could not restrain,--

"I'll warrant me it never had so much as a drop of water on its head,
and but little to its body, before my lady took it."

"But hath it not believing parents?"

"Our Swiss says," stated Zelie, with a respectful heretic's sparing of
this priest, "that it is the child of D'Aulnay de Charnisay." And she
added no comment. The soldiers set their spades to last year's sod, cut
an oblong wound, and soon had the earth heaped out and a grave made.
Father Jogues, perplexed, and heavy of heart for the sins of his
enlightened as well as his savage children, concluded to consecrate the
baby's bed. The Huguenot soldiers stood sullenly by while a Romish
service went on. They or their fathers had been driven out of France by
the bitterness of that very religion which Father Jogues expressed in
sweetness. They had not the broad sympathy of their lady, who could
excuse and even stoop to mend a priest's cassock; and they made their
pause as brief as possible.

While the spat and clink of spades built up one child's hillock, Zelie
was on her knees beside another some distance from it, scraping