otions, carrying death or healing, which wise old
men know how to distil from roots and leaves; incantations and every
magic art. And here on the fringe of another world, but a day's
journey from the railway, in this wooden house filled with acrid
smoke, another all-conquering spell, charming and bewildering the
eyes of three young men, is being woven into the shifting cloud by a
sweet and guileless maid with downcast eyes.

The hour was late; the visitors departed; first the two Surprenants,
then Eutrope Gagnon, only Francois Paradis was left,--standing
there and seeming to hesitate.

"You will sleep here to-night, Francois?" asked the father.

His wife heard no reply. "Of course!" said she. "And to-morrow we
will all gather blueberries. It is the feast of Ste. Anne."

When a few moments later Francois mounted to the loft with the boys,
Maria's heart was filled with happiness. This seemed to bring him a
little nearer, to draw him within the family circle.

The morrow was a day of blue sky, a day when from the heavens some
of the sparkle and brightness descends to earth. The green of tender
grass and young wheat was of a ravishing delicacy, even the dun
woods borrowed something from the azure of the sky.

Francois came down in the morning looking a different man, in
clothes borrowed from Da'Be and Esdras, and after he had shaved and
washed Madame Chapdelaine complimented him on his appearance.

When breakfast was over and the hour of the mass come, all told
their chaplet together; and then the long delightful idle Sunday lay
before them. But the day's programme was already settled. Eutrope
Gagnon came in just as they were finishing dinner, which was early,
and at once they all set forth, provided with pails, dishes and tin
mugs of every shape and size.

The blueberries were fully ripe. In the burnt lands the purple of
the clusters and the green of the leaves now overcame the paling
rose of the laurels. The children began picking at once with cries
of delight, but their elders scattered through the woods in search
of the larger patches, where one might sit on one's heels and fill a
pail in an hour. The noise of footsteps on dry twigs, of rustling in
the alder bushes, the calls of Telesphore and Alma Rose to one
another, all faded slowly into the distance, and about each gatherer
was only the buzzing of flies drunk with sunshine, and the voice of
the wind in the young birches and aspens.

"There is a fine clump