Through all the occupations and pleasures of the summer Jacques kept
as near as he could to Serena. If he learned a new tune, by
listening to the piano--some simple, artful air of Mozart, some
melancholy echo of a nocturne of Chopin, some tender, passionate
love-song of Schubert--it was to her that he would play it first.
If he could persuade her to a boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday
evening, the week was complete. He even learned to know the more
shy and delicate forest-blossoms that she preferred, and would come
in from a day's guiding with a tiny bunch of belated twin-flowers,
or a few purple-fringed orchids, or a handful of nodding stalks of
the fragrant pyrola, for her.

So the summer passed, and the autumn, with its longer hunting
expeditions into the depth of the wilderness; and by the time winter
came around again, Fiddlin' Jack was well settled at Moody's as a
regular Adirondack guide of the old-fashioned type, but with a
difference. He improved in his English. Something of that missing
quality which Moody called ambition, and to which Hose Ransom gave
the name of imagination, seemed to awaken within him. He saved his
wages. He went into business for himself in a modest way, and made
a good turn in the manufacture of deerskin mittens and snow-shoes.
By the spring he had nearly three hundred dollars laid by, and
bought a piece of land from Ransom on the bank of the river just
above the village.

The second summer of guiding brought him in enough to commence
building a little house. It was of logs, neatly squared at the
corners; and there was a door exactly in the middle of the facade,
with a square window at either side, and another at each end of the