Love's Rewards




AN ALGONQUIN MAIDEN.




CHAPTER I.

THE YOUNG MASTER OF PINE TOWERS.


It was a May morning in 1825--spring-time of the year, late spring-time
of the century. It had rained the night before, and a warm pallor in
the eastern sky was the only indication that the sun was trying to
pierce the gray dome of nearly opaque watery fog, lying low upon that
part of the world now known as the city of Toronto, then the town of
Little York. This cluster of five or six hundred houses had taken up a
determined position at the edge of a forest then gloomily forbidding
in its aspect, interminable in extent, inexorable in its resistance to
the shy or to the sturdy approaches of the settler. Man _versus_
nature--the successive assaults of perishing humanity upon the almost
impregnable fortresses of the eternal forests--this was the struggle
of Canadian civilization, and its hard-won triumphs were bodied forth
in the scattered roofs of these cheap habitations. Seen now through
soft gradations of vapoury gloom, they took on a poetic significance,
as tenderly intangible as the romantic halo which the mist of years