CHILDREN OF THE FOREST.

here could hardly be a wider contrast than between Captain Argent's usual dinner at his regimental mess, and that of which he now partook in the lumbermen's shanty. Tables and chairs were as unknown as forks and dishes among the gens de chantier; a large pot of tea, dipped into by everybody's pannikin, served for beer and wine; pork was the pièce de résistance, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an occasional remark in Irish or Scottish brogue.

'Your men seem to be temperance folk,' observed Argent to the foreman.

'Weel, they must be,' was the laconic reply. 'We've no stores where they could get brandy-smash in the bush, and it's so much the better for them, or I daursay they wad want prisons and juries next. As it is, they're weel behaved lads eneugh.'

'I'm sure it must be good in a moral point of view; but do you find them equal to as much work as if they had beer or spirits?' asked Captain Argent. 'And lumbering seems to me to be particularly laborious.'

'Weel, there's a fact I'll mak a present to the teetotallers,' answered the foreman. 'Our lumberers get nothing in the way of stimulant, and they don't seem to want it. When I came fresh from the auld country, I couldna hardly b'lieve that.'

'Au large, au large!'

At this word of command all hands turned out of the shanty, and went back to work in their several gangs. Again the fellers attacked the hugest pines; the hewers sprang upon the fallen, lining and squaring the living trees into dead beams; and the teamsters yoked afresh their patient oxen, fitting upon each massive throat the heavy wooden collar, and attaching to chains the ponderous log which should be moved towards the water highway.

Argent and Arthur found themselves presently at the foot of a colossal Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre in the neighbourhood might travel easily and safely to the water's edge; and forty yards of bedding timbers lay a ready-made couch, for its great length.