faced, coarsely-clad and vigorous girl, the grotesque little
hunchback, all just as real as life itself. Each of us can see
them, even with closed eyes. Led by that wonderful guide,
Imagination, we step back a century and more to look over a scene
at once strangely attractive and unspeakably forlorn.

What was it that drew people away from the old countries, from the
cities, the villages and the vineyards of beautiful France, for
example, to dwell in the wilderness, amid wild beasts and wilder
savage Indians, with a rude cabin for a home and the exposures and
hardships of pioneer life for their daily experience?

Men like Gaspard Roussillon are of a distinct stamp. Take him as
he was. Born in France, on the banks of the Rhone near Avignon, he
came as a youth to Canada, whence he drifted on the tide of
adventure this way and that, until at last he found himself, with
a wife, at Post Vincennes, that lonely picket of religion and
trade, which was to become the center of civilizing energy for the
great Northwestern Territory. M. Roussillon had no children of his
own; so his kind heart opened freely to two fatherless and
motherless waifs. These were Alice, now called Alice Roussillon,
and the hunchback, Jean. The former was twelve years old, when he
adopted her, a child of Protestant parents, while Jean had been
taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been killed and
scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid, whose
appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed itself
most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding, was a
woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband
clung tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances
most in vogue when he took leave of France.