snow. The rivers, with edge of thin ice upon their quiet places,
rolled, gathering into the surface of their waters the cold that would
so soon create their crystal prison.

The bright sun of a late November day was shining upon a small lake that
lay in the lonely region to the west of the Gaspé Peninsula near the
Matapediac Valley. There was one farm clearing on a slope of the wild
hills that encircled the lake. The place was very lonely. An eagle that
rose from the fir-clad ridge above the clearing might from its eminence,
have seen other human habitations, but such sight was denied to the
dwellers in the rude log-house on the clearing. The eagle wheeled in the
air and flew southward. A girl standing near the log-house watched it
with discontented eyes.

The blue water of the lake, with ceaseless lapping, cast up glinting
reflections of the cold sunlight. Down the hillside a stream ran to join
the lake, and it was on the more sheltered slope by this stream, where
grey-limbed maple trees grew, that the cabin stood. Above and around,
the steeper slopes bore only fir trees, whose cone-shaped or spiky
forms, sometimes burnt and charred, sometimes dead and grey, but for the
most part green and glossy, from shore and slope and ridge pointed
always to the blue zenith.

The log-house, with its rougher sheds, was hard by the stream's ravine.
About the other sides of it stretched a few acres of tilled land. Round
this land the maple wood closed, and under its grey trees there was a
tawny brown carpet of fallen leaves from which the brighter autumn
colours had already faded. Up the hillside in the fir wood there were
gaps where the trees had been felled for lumber, and about a quarter of
a mile from the house a rudely built lumber slide descended to the lake.