Strongly have built them and well; and, breaking the glebe round about them,

Filled the barn with hay, and the house with food for a twelvemonth.

René Leblanc will be here anon, with his papers and inkhorn.

Shall we not then be glad, and rejoice in the joy of our children ? "

As apart by the window she stood, with her hand in her lover's,

Blushing Evangeline heard the words that her father had spoken,

And as they died on his lips the worthy notary

entered.

37

III.

BENT like a laboring oar, that toils in the surf

of the ocean,

Bent, but not broken, by age was the form of the notary public;

Shocks of yellow hair, like the silken floss of the maize, hung

Over his shoulders; his forehead was high; and glasses with horn bows

Sat astride on his nose, with a look of wisdom

supernal.

Father of twenty children was he, and more than a hundred

Children's children rode on his knee, and heard his great watch tick.

Four long years in the times of the war had he languished a captive,

Suffering much in an old French fort as the friend of the English.

Now, though warier grown, without all guile or suspicion,

Ripe in wisdom was he, but patient, and simple, and childlike.

He was beloved by all, and most of all by the

children;

For he told them tales of the Loup-garou in the

forest,

And of the goblin that came in the night to water

the horses,

And of the white Létiche, the ghost of a child

who unchristened

Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the

chambers of children;

And how on Christmas eve the oxen talked in

the stable,

And how the fever was cured by a spider shut up in a nutshell,

And of the marvellous powers of four-leaved clover and horseshoes,

With whatsoever else was writ in the lore of the village.

Then

up rose from his seat by the fireside Basil the blacksmith,

Knocked from his pipe the ashes, and slowly extending his right hand,

"Father Leblanc," he exclaimed, "thou hast

heard the talk in the village,

And, perchance, canst tell us some news of these ships and their errand.”

Then with modest demeanour made answer the

notary public,

Gossip enough have I heard, in sooth, yet am

never the wiser;