pick of the province." This was what the Old Cure said in despair, when
Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married l'Espagnole, or
"the Spanische," as the lady was always called in the English of the
habitant.

When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all. It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir. The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging cry
of a saw-mill. Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it. So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour's in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques, having spent a year at Laval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his quaint,
sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while they
amused his guests. They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.

But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day when
the young "Spanische" came driving up the river-road from the steamboat-
landing miles away. She arrived just when the clock struck noon in the
big living-room of the Manor. As she reached the open doorway and the
wide windows of the house which gaped with shady coolness, she heard the
bell summoning the workers in the mills and on the farm--yes, M. Barbille
was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to "M'sieu' Jean Jacques," as he