It was a boy of ten who listened to La Rose, and while he listened, the sun stood still in the sky, there was an enchantment on all the world. Whatever La Rose said you had to believe, somehow. Oh, I assure you, no one could be more exacting than she in the matter of proofs. For persons who would give an ear to any absurd story tattled abroad she had nothing but contempt.
"Before you believe a thing," said La Rose, sagely, "you must know whether it is true or not. That is the most important part of a story."
She would give a decisive nod to her small head and shut her lips together almost defiantly. Yet always, somewhere in the corner of her alert gray eye, there seemed to be lurking the ghost of a twinkle. La Rose had no age. She was both very young and very old. For all she had never traveled more than ten miles from the little Cape Breton town of Port l'Évêque, you had the feeling that she had seen a good deal of the world, and it is certain that her life had not been easy; yet she would laugh as quickly and abundantly as a young girl just home from the convent.
These two were the best of comrades. La Rose had been the boy's nurse when he was little, and as he had no mother she had kept a feeling of special affection and responsibility for him. Thus it happened that whenever she was making some little expedition out across the harbor—say for blueberries on the barrens, or white moorberries, or ginseng—she would get permission from the captain for Michel to go with her; and this was the happiest privilege in the boy's life. Most of all because of the stories La Rose would tell him.
La Rose had a story to tell about every spot they visited, about every person they passed. She had been brought up, herself, out here on the Cape; and not an inch of its territory but was familiar to her.
"Now that is where those Bucherons lived," she observed one day, as they were walking homeward from Pig Cove by the Calvaire road. "They are all gone now, and the house is almost fallen to pieces; but once things were lively enough there—mon Dieu, oui!—quite lively enough for comfort."
She gave a sagacious nod to her head, with the look of one who could say more, and would, if you urged her a little.
"Was it at the Bucherons' that all the chairs stood on one leg?" asked Michel, thrilling mysteriously.
"Oui, c'est ça," answered La Rose, in a voice of the most sepulchral, "right there in that house, the chairs stood on one leg and went rap—rap—against the floor. And more than once a table with dishes and other things on it fell over, and there were strange sounds in the cupboard. Oh, it is certain those Bucherons were tormented; but for that matter they had brought it on themselves because of their greediness and their hard hearts. It came for a punishment; and when they repented themselves, it went away."
"I haven't ever heard all the story about the Bucherons," said Michel—"or at least, not since I was big. I am almost sure I would like it."