gan to be in English too, and by and by not in French at all.

"Sir, have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man
named 'Thanase Beausoleil?"

But no one had seen him.

Travel was very slow. Not only because it was done afoot. Many a day
he had to tarry to earn bread, for he asked no alms. But after a while
he passed eastward into a third State, and at length into the
mountains of a fourth.

Meantime the weeks were lengthening into months; the year was in its
decline. Might not 'Thanase be even then at home? No. Every week
Bonaventure wrote back, "Has he come?" and the answer came back, "He
is not here."

But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a
huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below,
its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the
great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long,
trailing smoke of the last train--a rare, motionless blue gauze--gone
to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon
the track in front of him from higher up the mountain,--a great, lank
mountaineer. And when Bonaventure asked the apparition the untiring
question to which so many hundreds had answered No, the tall man
looked down upon the questioner, a bright smile suddenly lighting up
the unlovely chin-whiskered face, and asked:

"Makes a fiddle thess talk an' cry?"

"Yes."

"Well, he hain't been gone from hyer two weeks."

It was true. Only a few weeks before, gaunt, footsore, and ragged,
tramping the cross-ties yonder where the railway comes from the
eastward, curving into view out of that deep green and gray defile,
'Thanase had come into this valley. So short a time before, because
almost on his start homeward illness had halted him by the way and
held him long in arrest. But at length he had reached the valley, and
had lingered here for days; for it happened that a man in bought
clothing was there just then, roaming around and hammering pieces off
the rocks, who gave 'Thanase the chance to earn a little something
from him, with which the hard-marched wanderer might take the train
instead of the cross-ties for as far as the pittance would carry him.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE QUEST ENDED.

The next sunrise saw Bonaventure, with a new energy in his step,
journeying back the way he had come. And so anew the weeks wore by.
Once more the streams ran southward, and the landscapes opened wid