"O, I think I should pat my foot," answered Kitty; and in fact the
charming simpleton on shore, having perfected her attitude, was tapping
the ground nervously with the toe of her adorable slipper.

After the boat started, a Canadian lady of ripe age, yet of a vivacity
not to be reconciled with the notion of the married state, capered
briskly about among her somewhat stolid and indifferent friends, saying,
"They're going to fire it as soon as we round the point"; and presently
a dull boom, as of a small piece of ordnance discharged in the
neighborhood of the hotel, struck through the gathering fog, and this
elderly sylph clapped her hands and exulted: "They've fired it, they've
fired it! and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer." But the
captain did nothing of the kind, and the lady, after some more girlish
effervescence, upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and so sank
into such a flat and spiritless calm that she was sorrowful to see.

"Too bad, Mr. Arbuton, isn't it?" said the colonel; and Mr. Arbuton
listened in vague doubt while Kitty built up with her cousin a touching
romance for the poor lady, supposed to have spent the one brilliant and
successful summer of her life at Tadoussac, where her admirers had
agreed to bemoan her loss in this explosion of gunpowder. They asked him
if he did not wish the captain _had_ whistled; and "Oh!" shuddered
Kitty, "doesn't it all make you feel just as if you had been doing it
yourself?"--a question which he hardly knew how to answer, never having,
to his knowledge, done a ridiculous thing in his life, much less been
guilty of such behavior as that of the disappointed lady.

At Cacouna, where the boat stopped to take on the horses and carriages
of some home-returning sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages