Indeed, the fact that his
seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his
audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body
politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the
impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the
park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water,
the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to
substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.
Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps
as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We
conversed.
Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the
forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of
his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had
blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said,
eighty-seven--that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It
is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always
food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had
not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.
We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no
danger of loneliness.
Yes, he went on, he was old--eighty-five. He was not as quick as he
used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's
work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance.
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