r. If it had not been that their sloping roofs of
various heights and sizes formed a progression of angles not unpleasant
to the eye, the buildings would have been very ugly; but they had also a
generous and cleanly aspect which was attractive.

Caius brought the horses to the trough in pairs, each with a hempen
halter. They were lightly-built, well-conditioned beasts, but their days
of labour had wrought in them more of gentleness than of fire. As they
drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing
them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water
for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low
down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the
bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but
showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a
window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree
that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in the
air, as bare bones might rattle.

It was while he was still at the watering that the elder Simpson drove
up to the house door in his gig. He had been to the post-office. This
was not an event that happened every day, so that the letter which he
now handed Caius might as well as not have been retarded a day or two in
its delivery. Caius took it, leading the horses to their stalls, and he
examined it by the light of the stable lantern.

The writing, the appearance of the envelope and post-mark, were all
quite unfamiliar. The writing was the fine Italian hand common to ladies
of a former generation, and was, in Caius' mind, connected only with the
idea of elderly women. He opened the letter, therefore, with the less
curiosity. Inside he found several pages of the same fine writing, and
he read it with his arm round the neck of one of the horses. The
lantern, which he had hung on a nail in the stall, sent down dim
candlelight upon the pair.

When Caius had read the letter, he turned it over and over curiously,
and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any
relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le
Maitre, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own
home, was almost as unknown to him as the most remote foreign part. It
came from one of the Magdalen Islands, that lie some eighty miles'
journey by sea to the north of his native shore. The writer stated that
she k