d because he avoids the land. He keeps my
sail-boat for me and I let him use the old windmill we shall come to by
those trees."

The windmill and the cot of Le Brun stood in a birch-grown hollow, not
far off, where a stream cascaded into the St. Lawrence, and had worn
down the precipitous bank of earth. It was a wild picture. The gable of
the cot was stained Indian red down to the eaves, and a stone chimney
was embedded irregularly in its log side. The windmill, towering its
conical roof and rusty weather-vane a little distance off, and
stretching out its gray skeleton arms as if to creak more freely in the
sweep of gales from the river, was one of those rembrandtesque relics
which prove so picturesquely that Time is an artist inimitable by man. A
clay oven near the cot completed this group of erections, around and
behind which the silver birches and young elms grew up and closed.

No, Messieurs, Le Brun was not at home; he had gone to Isle of Ducks;
and all the blessings of the saints upon Monseigneur for his kindness to
a poor old woman.--"Ah, Seigneur!"

Chamilly took his skiff from the boathouse himself, and was soon pulling
swiftly from the shore, while as they got out upon it the vastness and
power of the stream became apparent.

From its broad surface the mists began to rise gracefully in long
drifts, moved by the early winds and partly obscuring the distant
shores, whose fringe of little shut up houses still suggested slumber.
The dews had freshened the pines of Dormilliere, and the old Church
stood majestically forward among them, throwing back its head and
keeping sleepless watch towards the opposite side. Gradually receding,
too, the Manoir showed less and less gable among its mass of foliage.

If the Church is one great institution of that country, the St. Lawrence
is no less another,--displaying thirty miles unbroken blue on a clear
day in the direction of the distant hill of Montreal, and on the other
hand, towards Lake St. Peter, a vista oceanlike and unhorizoned. In
certain regions numerous flat islands, covered by long grasses and
rushes intersected by labyrinthine passages, hide the boatman from the
sight of the world and form innumerable nooks of quiet which have a
class of scenery and inhabitants altogether their own. As the chaloupe
glides around some unsuspected corner, the crane rises heavily at the
splash of a paddle, wild duck fly off low and swiftly, the plover circle
away in bright handso