he path, ever leading the tired boy
upward from plateau to plateau,--"higher, to the vision and the
radiant space about the shining cross!"

Faint with hunger, worn with fatigue, in the half-trance of physical
exhaustion, Mini still dragged himself upward through the afternoon.
At last he knew he stood on the summit level very near the cross.
There the child, awed by the imminence of what he had sought, halted
to control the rapturous, fearful trembling of his heart. Would not
the heavens surely open? What words would Angelique first say? Then
again he went swiftly forward through the trees to the edge of the
little cleared space. There he stood dazed.

The cross was revealed to him at a few yards' distance. With woful
disillusionment Mini threw himself face downward on the rock, and wept
hopelessly, sorely; wept and wept, till his sobs became fainter than
the up-borne long notes of a hermit-thrush far below on the edge of
the plain.

A tall mast, with a shorter at right angles, both covered by tin
roofing-plates, held on by nails whence rust had run in streaks,--that
was the shining Cross of Rigaud! Fragments of newspaper, crusts of
bread, empty tin cans, broken bottles, the relics of many picnics
scattered widely about the foot of the cross; rude initial letters cut
deeply into its butt where the tin had been torn away;--these had Mini
seen.

The boy ceased to move. Shadows stole slowly lengthening over the
Vaudreuil champaign; the sun swooned down in a glamour of painted
clouds; dusk covered from sight the yellows and browns and greens of
the August fields; birds stilled with the deepening night; Rigaud
Mountain loomed from the plain, a dark long mass under a flying and
waning moon; stars came out from the deep spaces overhead, and still
Mini lay where he had wept.

LITTLE BAPTISTE.

A STORY OF THE OTTAWA RIVER.

Ma'ame Baptiste Larocque peered again into her cupboard and her flour
barrel, as though she might have been mistaken in her inspection
twenty minutes earlier.

"No, there is nothing, nothing at all!" said she to her old
mother-in-law. "And no more trust at the store. Monsieur Conolly was
too cross when I went for corn-meal yesterday. For sure, Baptiste
stays very long at the shanty this year."

"Fear nothing, Delima," answered the bright-eyed old woman. "The good
God will send a breakfast for the little ones, and for us. In seventy
years I do not know Him to fail once, my daughter. Bapti