of the good tobacco. It shall be for the others."

The reply was so unexpected that it almost took my breath away. For
Pat, the steady smoker, whose pipes were as invariable as the
precession of the equinoxes, to refuse his regular rations of the
soothing weed was a thing unheard of. Could he be growing proud in
his old age? Had he some secret supply of cigars concealed in his
kit, which made him scorn the golden Virginia leaf? I demanded an
explanation.

"But no, m'sieu'," he replied; "it is not that, most assuredly. It
is something entirely different--something very serious. It is a
reformation that I commence. Does m'sieu' permit that I should
inform him of it?"

Of course I permitted, or rather, warmly encouraged, the fullest
possible unfolding of the tale; and while we sat among the bags and
boxes, and the sun settled gently down behind the sharp-pointed firs
across the lake, and the evening sky and the waveless lake glowed
with a thousand tints of deepening rose and amber, Patrick put me in
possession of the facts which had led to a moral revolution in his
life.

"It was the Ma'm'selle Meelair, that young lady,--not very young,
but active like the youngest,--the one that I conducted down the
Grande Decharge to Chicoutimi last year, after you had gone away.
She said that she knew m'sieu' intimately. No doubt you have a good
remembrance of her?"

I admitted an acquaintance with the lady. She was the president of