wonderful garments. It was with poor Marie, then, as it
has some time or other been with us all: when every bird
that sang, every leaf that whispered, had in its tone a
cadence caught from the one loved voice. I have seen the
steeple strain, and rock, and heard the bells peal out
in all their clangourous melody, and I have fancied that
this delirious ecstasy of sound that bathed the earth
and went up to heaven was the voice of one slim girl with
dimples and sea-green eyes.

The mischievous young Scotchman had grown more serious
than Marie had ever seen him before.

"I hope, my child, that you will be happy here; the
customs of the people differ from yours, but your nature
is receptive to everything good and elevated, so that I
am certain you will soon grow to cherish our civilization."

I must say here for the benefit of the drivelling,
cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never
looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is
always on the search for a flaw, that I send passages
from Tennyson floating through my Marie's brain with good
justification. She had received a very fair education
at a convent in Red River. She could speak and write both
French and English with tolerable accuracy; and she could
with her supple, tawny little fingers, produce a nice
sketch of a prairie tree-clump, upon a sheet of cartridge
paper, or a piece of birch rind.