"Well, I daresay," agreed La Rose. "It is an interesting story in some ways; and the best of it is, it is not one of those stories that are only to make you laugh, and then you go right away and forget them. And another thing: this story about the Bucherons really happened. It was when my poor stepmother was a girl. She lived at Pig Cove then, and that is only two miles from Gros Nez. And one of those Bucherons was once wanting to marry her; but do you think she would have anything to do with a man like that?
"'No,' she said. 'I will have nothing to do with you. I would sooner not ever be married, me, than to have you for my man.'
"And the reason she spoke that way was because of the cruelty they had shown toward that poor widow of a Noémi, which everybody on the Cape knew about, and it was a great scandal. And if you want me to tell you about it, that is what I am going to do now."
La Rose seated herself on a flat rock by the road, and Michel found another for himself close by. Below them lay a deep rocky cove, with shores as steep as a sluice, and close above its inner margin stood the shell of a small house. The chimney had fallen in, the windows were all gone—only vacant holes now, through which you saw the daylight from the other side, and the roof had begun to sag.
"Yes," said La Rose, "it will soon be gone to pieces entirely, and then there will be nothing to remind anyone of those Bucherons and what torments they had. You see there were four of them, an old woman and two sons, and one of the sons was married, but there were not any children; and all those four must have had stones instead of hearts. They were only thinking how they could get the better of other people, and so become rich.
"And before that there had been three sons at home; but one of them—Benoît his name was—had married a certain Noémi Boudrot; and she was as sweet and beautiful as a lily, and he too was different from the others; and so they had not lived here, but had got a little house at Pig Cove, where they were very happy; and the good God sent them two children, of a beauty and gentleness indescribable; and they called them Évangéline and little Benoît, but you do not need to remember that, because it is not a part of the story.
"So things went on that way for quite a while; and all the time those four Bucherons were growing more and more hard-hearted, like four serpents in a pile together.
"Well, one day in October that Benoît Bucheron who lived in Pig Cove was going alone in a small cart to Port l'Évêque to buy some provisions for winter—flour, I suppose, and meal, and perhaps some clothes and some tobacco; and instead of going direct by the Gros Nez road, he came around this way by the Calvaire so as to stop in and speak to his relatives; and to see them welcoming him, you would never have suspected their stone hearts. But Benoît was solemn for all that, as if troubled by some idea. Then that sly old mother, she said:
"'Dear Benoît,' she said, 'what troubles you? Can you not put trust in your own mother, who loves you better than her eyes and nose?'—and she smiled at him just like a fat wicked old spider that is waiting for a fly to come and get tangled up in her net.
"But Benoît only remembered then that she was his mother; so he said: