several societies for ethical agitation--a long woman, with short
hair and eyeglasses and a great thirst for tea; not very good in a
canoe, but always wanting to run the rapids and go into the
dangerous places, and talking all the time. Yes; that must have
been the one. She was not a bosom friend of mine, to speak
accurately, but I remembered her well.

"Well, then, m'sieu'," continued Patrick, "it was this demoiselle
who changed my mind about the smoking. But not in a moment, you
understand; it was a work of four days, and she spoke much.

"The first day it was at the Island House; we were trolling for
ouananiche, and she was not pleased, for she lost many of the fish.
I was smoking at the stern of the canoe, and she said that the
tobacco was a filthy weed, that it grew in the devil's garden, and
that it smelled bad, terribly bad, and that it made the air sick,
and that even the pig would not eat it."

I could imagine Patrick's dismay as he listened to this
dissertation; for in his way he was as sensitive as a woman, and he
would rather have been upset in his canoe than have exposed himself
to the reproach of offending any one of his patrons by unpleasant or
unseemly conduct.

"What did you do then, Pat?" I asked.

"Certainly I put out the pipe--what could I do otherwise? But I
thought that what the demoiselle Meelair has said was very strange,
and not true--exactly; for I have often seen the tobacco grow, and
it springs up out of the ground like the wheat or the beans, and it