t-Castin's hearth. An Indian girl, ruddy from
high living, and wearing the brightest stuffs imported from France,
sat on the floor at the hearth corner. This was the usual night scene
at Pentegoet. Candle and firelight shone on her, on oak timbers, and
settles made of unpeeled balsam, on plate and glasses which always
heaped a table with ready food and drink, on moose horns and gun
racks, on stores of books, on festoons of wampum, and usually on a
dozen figures beside Saint-Castin. The other rooms in the house were
mere tributaries to this baronial presence chamber. Madockawando and
the dignitaries of the Abenaqui tribe made it their council hall, the
white sagamore presiding. They were superior to rude western nations.
It was Saint-Castin's plan to make a strong principality here, and to
unite his people in a compact state. He lavished his inherited money
upon them. Whatever they wanted from Saint-Castin they got, as from a
father. On their part, they poured the wealth of the woods upon him.
Not a beaver skin went out of Acadia except through his hands. The
traders of New France grumbled at his profits and monopoly, and the
English of New England claimed his seigniory. He stood on debatable
ground, in dangerous times, trying to mould an independent nation.
The Abenaquis did not know that a king of France had been reared
on Saint-Castin's native mountains, but they believed that a human
divinity had.

Their permanent settlement was about the fort, on land he had paid
for, but held in common with them. They went to their winter's hunting
or their summer's fishing from Pentegoet. It was the seat of power.
The cannon protected fields and a town of lodges which Saint-Castin
meant to convert into a town of stone and hewed wood houses as soon as
the aboriginal nature conformed itself to such stability. Even now
the village had left home and gone into the woods again. The Abenaqui
women were busy there, inserting tubes of bark in pierced maple-trees,
and troughs caught the flow of ascending sap. Kettles boiled over
fires in the bald spaces, incense of the forest's very heart rising
from them and sweetening the air. All day Indian children raced from
one mother's fire to another, or dipped unforbidden cups of hands into
the brimming troughs; and at night they lay down among the dogs, with
their heels to the blaze, watching these lower constellations blink
through the woods until their eyes swam into unconsciousness. It was
goo