gar! Perrotte be dere. And you got one good man TOO-day, for
sure."

That was fifteen years ago, and, barring certain "jubilations," Perrotte
made good his prophecy. He brought up from the Ottawa his Irish wife,
a clever woman with her tongue but a housekeeper that scandalised her
thrifty, tidy, French-Canadian mother-in-law, and his two children, a
boy and a girl. Under the supervision of his boss he made for his family
a home and for himself an assured place in the Blackwater Mills. His
children fell into the hands of a teacher with a true vocation for his
great work and a passion for young life. Under his hand the youth of
the rapidly growing mill village were saved from the sordid and
soul-debasing influences of their environment, were led out of the muddy
streets and can-strewn back yards to those far heights where dwell the
high gods of poesy and romance. From the master, too, they learned to
know their own wonderful woods out of which the near-by farms had been
hewn. Many a home, too, owed its bookshelf to Alex Day's unobtrusive
suggestions.

The Perrotte children were prepared for High School by the master's
quiet but determined persistence. To the father he held up the
utilitarian advantages of an education.

"Your boy is quick--why should not Tony be a master of men some day?
Give him a chance to climb."

"Oui, by gar! Antoine he's smart lee'le feller. I mak him steeck on his
book, you mak him one big boss on some mill."

To the mother the master spoke of social advantages. The empty-headed
Irish woman who had all the quick wit and cleverness of tongue
characteristic of her race was determined that her girl Annette should
learn to be as stylish as "them that tho't themselves her betters." So
the children were kept at school by their fondly ambitious parents, and
the master did the rest.

At the Public School, that greatest of all democratic institutions, the
Perrotte children met the town youth of their own age, giving and taking
on equal terms, sharing common privileges and advantages and growing
into a community solidarity all their own, which in later years brought
its own harvest of mingling joy and bitterness, but which on the whole
made for sound manhood and womanhood.

With the girl Annette one effect of the Public School and its
influences, educational and social, was to reveal to her the depth of
the educational and social pit from which she had been taken. Her High
School training might have