e Gelee the housewife has persuaded _le
vieux_ to lay aside his gun, and the early potatoes are already
planted. If the moon be at the full, much ground is ready for the
sower; and those ploughmen and pony teams and men working along behind
them with big, clumsy hoes, over in yonder field, are planting corn.
Those silent, tremulous strands of black that in the morning sky come
gliding, high overhead, from the direction of the great sea-marshes
and fade into the northern blue, are flocks that have escaped the
murderous gun of the pot-hunter. Spring and Summer are driving these
before them as the younger and older sister, almost abreast, come
laughing, and striving to outrun each other across the Mexican Gulf.

Those two travellers on horseback, so dwarfed by distance, whom you
see approaching out of the north-west, you shall presently find have
made, in their dress, no provision against cold. At Carancro, some
miles away to the north-east, there is a thermometer; and somewhere in
Vermilionville, a like distance to the south-east, there might
possibly be found a barometer; but there is no need of either to tell
that the air to-day is threescore and ten and will be more before it
is less. Before the riders draw near you have noticed that only one is
a man and the other a woman. And now you may see that he is sleek and
alert, blonde and bland, and the savage within us wants to knock off
his silk hat. All the more so for that she is singularly pretty to be
met in his sole care. The years count on her brows, it is true, but
the way in which they tell of matronhood--and somehow of widowhood
too--is a very fair and gentle way. Her dress is plain, but its lines
have a grace that is also dignity; and the lines of her face--lines is
too hard a word for them--are not those of time, but of will and of
care, that have chastened and refined one another. She speaks only now
and then. Her companion's speech fills the wide intervals.

"Yesterday morning," he says, "as I came along here a little after
sunrise, there was a thin fog lying only two or three feet deep, close
to the level ground as far as you could see, hiding the whole prairie,
and making it look for all the world like a beautiful lake, with every
here and there a green grove standing out of it like a real little
island."

She replies that she used to see it so in her younger days. The
Acadian accent is in her words. She lifts her black eyes, looks toward
Carancro, and is