insolent youth. The names of these people were John and Audrey
Malbrouck; the Man was known to the makers of backwoods history as
Captain John. Gregory says about that--but no, not yet!--let his first
meeting with the Man and the Woman be described in his own words, unusual
and flippant as they sometimes are; for though he is a graduate of
Trinity College, Cambridge, and a brother of a Right Honourable, he has
conceived it his duty to emancipate himself in the matter of style in
language; and he has succeeded.

"It was autumn," he said, "all colours; beautiful and nippy on the Height
of Land; wild ducks, the which no man could number, and bear's meat
abroad in the world. I was alone. I had hunted all day, leaving my mark
now and then as I journeyed, with a cache of slaughter here, and a blazed
hickory there. I was hungry as a circus tiger--did you ever eat slippery
elm bark?--yes, I was as bad as that. I guessed from what I had been
told, that the Malbrouck show must be hereaway somewhere. I smelled the
lake miles off--oh, you could too if you were half the animal I am; I
followed my nose and the slippery-elm between my teeth, and came at a
double-quick suddenly on the fair domain. There the two sat in front of
the house like turtle-doves, and as silent as a middy after his first
kiss. Much as I ached to get my tooth into something filling, I wished
that I had 'em under my pencil, with that royal sun making a rainbow of
the lake, the woods all scarlet and gold, and that mist of purple--eh,
you've seen it?--and they sitting there monarchs of it all, like that
duffer of a king who had operas played for his solitary benefit. But
I hadn't a pencil and I had a hunger, and I said 'How!' like any other
Injin--insolent, wasn't it? Then the Man rose, and he said I was
welcome, and she smiled an approving but not very immediate smile, and
she kept her seat,--she kept her seat, my boy,--and that was the first
thing that set me thinking. She didn't seem to be conscious that there