CHAPTER XXII.
LIGHT AT EVENTIDE.
1839.
Spring had come. The aged Chief, who had passed the seventy-ninth anniversary of his birth, sat propped up with pillows gazing at the swollen torrent, with its seething, tumbling mass of white foam, as it rushed with resistless power into the big cauldron below.
Through the half-open window the fragrance of blossoming fruit-trees found its way into the room. From the eastern window he could see the smoke rising from his innumerable factories and mills; through the southern one the burnished roofs and steeples of the opposite cliffs sparkled and glittered in the sunshine.
As he gazed thoughtfully at the panorama before him, he said to Chrissy, who with her husband had carefully nursed him for five years while suffering with a broken thigh, occasioned by a fall on the pavement near the St. Louis gate at Quebec:
"It makes one think of time as it rolls on like a mighty rushing river soon to lose itself in the vast sea of eternity."
Chrissy sat by his bedside reading, and seemed oblivious to the remark. At length, looking up from the book with a face beaming with satisfaction, she said:
"Do you know what the Surveyor-General says of you, father? I have just been reading a marked copy of his Topographical Report to William IV., which Mr. Papineau has sent, and in which he says, after describing the advanced stage of civilization found in our township:
"'From whence are all these benefits derived? Whose persevering talent and enterprising spirit first pierced the gloom of these forests and converted a wilderness of trees into fields of corn? Whose industrious hand first threw into the natural desert the seeds of plenty and prosperity?