THE BEAUPORT LOUP-GAROU.


October dusk was bleak on the St. Lawrence, an east wind feeling along
the river's surface and rocking the vessels of Sir William Phips
on tawny rollers. It was the second night that his fleet sat there
inactive. During that day a small ship had approached Beauport
landing; but it stuck fast in the mud and became a mark for gathering
Canadians until the tide rose and floated it off. At this hour all
the habitants about Beauport except one, and even the Huron Indians
of Lorette, were safe inside the fort walls. Cattle were driven and
sheltered inland. Not a child's voice could be heard in the parish of
Beauport, and not a woman's face looked through windows fronting the
road leading up toward Montmorenci. Juchereau de Saint-Denis, the
seignior of Beauport, had taken his tenants with him as soon as the
New England invaders pushed into Quebec Basin. Only one man of the
muster hid himself and stayed behind, and he was too old for military
service. His seignior might lament him, but there was no woman to do
so. Gaspard had not stepped off his farm for years. The priest visited
him there, humoring a bent which seemed as inelastic as a vow. He had
not seen the ceremonial of high mass in the cathedral of Upper Town
since he was a young man.

Gaspard's farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long. It was one of
several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights
east of Beauport which rise to Montmorenci Falls. He had his front on
the greater stream, and his inland boundary among woods skirting the
mountain. He raised his food and the tobacco he smoked, and braided
his summer hats of straw and knitted his winter caps of wool. One suit
of well-fulled woolen clothes would have lasted a habitant a lifetime.