rom 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 floors. Autumn came to the Laurentians. In
the morning t