rge,
accompanied on his last trip by a plumber of sorts from Beaupre, thirty
miles down the line; and between them they had improvised a bathroom, and
attached a boiler to the range! Only a week before the arrival of Madame
the spring on the hillside above the camp had been tapped, and the pipe
laid securely underground. Besides this unheard-of luxury for the Lac du
Sablier there were iron beds and mattresses and little wood stoves to go
in the four bedrooms, which were more securely chinked with moss. The
traditions of that camp had been hospitable. In Professor Wishart's day
many guests had come and gone, or pitched their tents nearby; and Augusta
Maturin, until this summer, had rarely been here alone, although she had
no fears of the wilderness, and Delphin brought his daughter Delphine to
do the housework and cooking. The land for miles round about was owned by
a Toronto capitalist who had been a friend of her father, and who could
afford as a hobby the sparing of the forest. By his permission a few
sportsmen came to fish or shoot, and occasionally their campfires could
be seen across the water, starlike glows in the darkness of the night, at
morning and evening little blue threads of smoke that rose against the
forest; "bocane," Delphin called it, and Janet found a sweet, strange
magic in these words of the pioneer.

The lake was a large one, shaped like an hourglass, as its name implied,
and Augusta Maturin sometimes paddled Janet through the wide, shallow
channel to the northern end, even as she had once paddled Gifford. Her
genius was for the helpless. One day, when the waters were high, and the
portages could be dispensed with, they made an excursion through the
Riviere des Peres to the lake of that name, the next in the chain above.
For luncheon they ate the trout Augusta caught; and in the afternoon,
when they returned to the mouth of the outlet, Herve, softly checking the
canoe with his paddle, whispered the word "Arignal!" Thigh deep in the
lush grasses of the swamp was an animal with a huge grey head, like a
donkey's, staring foolishly in their direction--a cow moose. With a
tremendous commotion that awoke echoes in the forest she tore herself
from the mud and disappeared, followed by her panic-stricken offspring, a
caricature of herself....

By September the purple fireweed that springs up beside old camps, and in
the bois brute, had bloomed and scattered its myriad, impalpable
thistledowns over crystal