at least no want of life. It buzzed
and chirped and chattered all round them from marsh and stream and
brushwood. Sometimes it was the dun coat of a deer which glanced
between the distant trunks, sometimes the badger which scuttled for its
hole at their approach. Once the long in-toed track of a bear lay
marked in the soft earth before them, and once Amos picked a great horn
from amid the bushes which some moose had shed the month before.
Little red squirrels danced and clattered above their heads, and every
oak was a choir with a hundred tiny voices piping from the shadow of its
foliage. As they passed the lakes the heavy gray stork flapped up in
front of them, and they saw the wild duck whirring off in a long V
against the blue sky, or heard the quavering cry of the loon from amid
the reeds.

That night they slept in the woods, Amos Green lighting a dry wood fire
in a thick copse where at a dozen paces it was invisible. A few drops
of rain had fallen, so with the quick skill of the practised woodsman he
made two little sheds of elm and basswood bark, one to shelter the two
refugees, and the other for Ephraim and himself. He had shot a wild
goose, and this, with the remains of their biscuit, served them both for
supper and for breakfast. Next day at noon they passed a little
clearing, in the centre of which were the charred embers of a fire.
Amos spent half an hour in reading all that sticks and ground could tell
him. Then, as they resumed their way, he explained to his companions
that the fire had been lit three weeks before, that a white man and two
Indians had camped there, that they had been journeying from west to
east, and that one of the Indians had been a squaw. No other traces of
their fellow-mortals did they come across, until late in the afternoon
Amos halted suddenly in the heart of a thick grove, and raised his hand
to his ear.

"Listen!" he cried.

"I hear nothing," said Ephraim.

"Nor I," added De Catinat.

"Ah, but I do!" cried Adele gleefully. "It is a bell--and at the very
time of day when the bells all sound in Paris!"

"You are right, madame. It is what they call the Angelus bell."

"Ah, yes, I hear it now!" cried De Catinat. "It was drowned by the
chirping of the birds. But whence comes a bell in the heart of a
Canadian forest?"

"We are near the settlements on the Richelieu. It must be the bell of
the chapel at the fort."

"Fort St. Louis! Ah, then, we are no great way f