nt,
and from a distance came the notes of an exceeding strange strain
blent with the meditative murmur of the Rataplan Rapids.

I am not well enough acquainted with musical terms to tell the method
of that composition in which the wail of a Highland coronach seemed
mingled with such mournful crooning as I had heard often from Indian
voyageurs north of Lake Superior. Perhaps that fancy sprang from my
knowledge that Angus McNeil's father had been a younger son of the
chief of the McNeil clan, and his mother a daughter of the greatest
man of the Cree nation.

"Ay, but Angus is wae," sighed old McTavish. "What will he be seeing
the now? It was the night before his wife died that he played yon
last. Come, we will go up the road. He does be liking to see the
people gather to listen."

We walked, maybe three hundred yards, and stood leaning against the
ruined picket-fence that surrounds the great stone house built by
Hector McNeil, the father of Angus, when he retired from his position
as one of the "Big Bourgeois" of the famous Northwest Fur Trading
Company.

The huge square structure of four stories and a basement is divided,
above the ground floor, into eight suites, some of four, and some of
five rooms. In these suites the fur-trader, whose ideas were all
patriarchal, had designed that he and his Indian wife, with his seven
sons and their future families, should live to the end of his days and
theirs. That was a dream at the time when his boys were all under nine
years old, and Godfrey little more than a baby in arms.

The ground-floor is divided by a hall twenty-five feet wide into two
long chambers, one intended to serve as a dining-hall for the
multitude of descendants that Hector expected to see round his old
age, the other as a withdrawing-room for himself and his wife, or for
festive occasions. In this mansion Angus McNeil now dwelt alone.

He sat out that evening on a balcony at the rear of the hall, whence
he could overlook the McTavish place and the hamlet that extends a
quarter of a mile further down the Ottawa's north shore. His right
side was toward the large group of French-Canadian people who had
gathered to hear him play. Though he was sitting, I could make out
that his was a gigantic figure.

"Ay--it will be just exactly 'Great Godfrey's Lament,'" McTavish
whispered. "Weel do I mind him playing yon many's the night after
Godfrey was laid in the mools. Then he played it no more till before
his ain