eggs, and the rich contents
will resemble, as a poet might say, 'fossils of the rock in golden yolks
embedded and enjellied!' Season as you would a saint. Cover with a slab
of pastry. Bake it as you would cook an angel, and not singe a feather.
Then let it cool, and eat it! And then, Jules, as the Reverend Father de
Berey always says after grace over an Easter pie, 'Dominus vobiscum!'"

CHAPTER XXI. SIC ITUR AD ASTRA.

The old hall of Belmont had been decorated for many a feast since the
times of its founder, the Intendant Talon; but it had never contained a
nobler company of fair women and brave men, the pick and choice of their
race, than to-day met round the hospitable and splendid table of the
Bourgeois Philibert in honor of the fete of his gallant son.

Dinner was duly and decorously despatched. The social fashion of New
France was not for the ladies to withdraw when the wine followed
the feast, but to remain seated with the gentlemen, purifying the
conversation, and by their presence restraining the coarseness which was
the almost universal vice of the age.

A troop of nimble servitors carried off the carved dishes and fragments
of the splendid patisseries of Maitre Guillot, in such a state of
demolition as satisfied the critical eye of the chief cook that the
efforts of his genius had been very successful. He inspected the dishes
through his spectacles. He knew, by what was left, the ability of the
guests to discriminate what they had eaten and to do justice to his
skill. He considered himself a sort of pervading divinity, whose
culinary ideas passing with his cookery into the bodies of the guests
enabled them, on retiring from the feast, to carry away as part of
themselves some of the fine essence of Maitre Gobet himself.

At the head of his table, peeling oranges and slicing pineapples for the
ladies in his vicinity, sat the Bourgeois himself, laughing, jesting,
and telling anecdotes with a geniality that was contagious. "'The gods
are merry sometimes,' says Homer, 'and their laughter shakes Olympus!'"
was the classical remark of Father de Berey, at the other end of
the table. Jupiter did not laugh with less loss of dignity than the
Bourgeois.

Few of the guests did not remember to the end of their lives the
majestic and happy countenance of the Bourgeois on this memorable day.

At his right hand sat Amelie de Repentigny and the Count de la
Galissoniere. The Governor, charmed with the beauty and a