much, though he play with the Divil betunewhiles." Without looking at
them, Wendling said, in a low voice: "It was just such a day, down there
in Quebec, when It happened. You could hear the swill of the river, the
water licking the piers, and the saws in the Big Mill and the Little Mill
as they marched through the timber, flashing their teeth like bayonets.
It's a wonderful sound on a hot, clear day--that wild, keen singing of
the saws, like the cry of a live thing fighting and conquering. Up from
the fresh-cut lumber in the yards there came a smell like the juice of
apples, and the sawdust, as you thrust your hand into it, was as cool and
soft as the leaves of a clove-flower in the dew. On these days the town
was always still. It looked sleeping, and you saw the heat quivering up
from the wooden walls and the roofs of cedar shingles as though the
houses were breathing."

Here he paused, still intent on the shaking sunshine. Then he turned to
the others as if suddenly aware that he had been talking to them. Shon
was about to speak, but Pierre threw a restraining glance, and, instead,
they all looked through the doorway and beyond. In the settlement below
they saw the effect that Wendling had described. The houses breathed.
A grasshopper went clacking past, a dog at the door snapped up a fly; but
there seemed no other life of day. Wendling nodded his head towards the
distance. "It was quiet, like that. I stood and watched the mills and
the yards, and listened to the saws, and looked at the great slide, and
the logs on the river: and I said ever to myself that it was all mine--
all. Then I turned to a big house on the hillock beyond the cedars,
whose windows were open, with a cool dusk lying behind them. More than
all else, I loved to think I owned that house and what was in it. . . .
She was a beautiful woman. And she used to sit in a room facing the
mill--though the house fronted another way--thinking of me, I did not
doubt, and working at some delicate needle-stuff. There never had been a