birds. She had come to teach me bead-work; I had already taken several
lessons to while away the time, but found myself an awkward scholar.

'Bonjou', madame,' she said, in her patois of broken English
and degenerate French. 'Pretty here.'

My little parlor had a square of carpet, a hearth-fire of great logs,
Turkey-red curtains, a lounge and arm-chair covered with chintz,
several prints on the cracked walls, and a number of books,--the whole
well used and worn, worth perhaps twenty dollars in any town below,
but ten times twenty in icy Mackinac. I began the bead-work, and
Jeannette was laughing at my mistakes, when the door opened, and our
surgeon came in, pausing to warm his hands before going up to his room
in the attic. A taciturn man was our surgeon, Rodney Prescott, not
popular in the merry garrison circle, but a favorite of mine; the
Puritan, the New-Englander, the Bostonian, were as plainly written
upon his face as the French and Indian were written upon Jeannette.

'Sit down, Doctor,' I said.

He took a seat and watched us carelessly, now and then smiling at
Jeannette's chatter as a giant might smile upon a pygmy. I could see
that the child was putting on all her little airs to attract his
attention; now the long lashes swept the cheeks, now they were raised
suddenly, disclosing the unexpected blue eyes: the little moccasined
feet must be warmed on the fender, the braids must be swept back with
an impatient movement of the hand and shoulder, and now and then there
was a coquettish arch of the red lips, less than a pout, what she
herself would have called 'une p'tite moue.' Our surgeon
watched this pantomime unmoved.