our father"--

Claude's eyes answered with a glad flash. "Dass what I was t'inkin'!"
he said, with a soft glow that staid even when he fell again into
revery.

But when the engineer--for it seems that he was an engineer, chief of
a party engaged in redeeming some extensive waste swamp and marsh
lands--when the chief engineer, on the third day afterward, drew near
the place where he suddenly recollected Claude would be waiting to
enter his service, and recalled this part of their previous interview,
he said to himself, "No, it would be good for the father, but not best
for the son," and fell to thinking how often parents are called upon
to wrench their affections down into cruel bounds to make the
foundations of their children's prosperity.

Claude widened to his new experience with the rapidity of something
hatched out of a shell. Moreover, accident was in his favor; the party
was short-handed in its upper ranks, and Claude found himself by this
stress taken into larger and larger tasks as fast as he could, though
ever so crudely, qualify for them.

"'Tisn't at all the best thing for you," said one of the surveyors,
"but I'll lend you some books that will teach you the why as well as
the how."

In the use of these books by lantern-light certain skill with the pen
showed itself; and when at length one day a despatch reached camp from
the absent "chief" stating that in two or three days certain matters
would take him to Vermilionville, and ordering that some one be sent
at once with all necessary field notes and appliances, and give his
undivided time to the making of certain urgently needed maps, and the
only real draughtsman of the party was ill with swamp-fever, Claude
was sent.

On his last half-day's journey toward the place, he had fallen in with
an old gentleman whom others called "Governor," a tall, trim figure,
bent but little under fourscore years, with cheerful voice and ready
speech, and eyes hidden behind dark glasses and flickering in their
deep sockets.

"Go to Madame Beausoleil's," he advised Claude. "That is the place for
you. Excellent person; I've known her from childhood; a woman worthy a
higher station." And so, all by accident, chance upon chance, here
was Claude making maps; and this delightful work, he thought, was
really all he was doing, in Zosephine's little inner parlor.

By and by it was done. The engineer had not yet arrived. The storm had
delayed work in one place and undone work