Then he took his seat beside Martine and they drove along slowly. After a turn or two they came to the place that Martine called "the beehive farm." Already she had related the story of Mr. Frazer's adventure, and her acquaintance had laughed heartily at her account of the good man's flight after the recreant Jill.
"I didn't suppose even a swarm of bees could put any speed into Jill, but Frazer himself is so conscientious that I wonder that he isn't sitting here on the fence waiting for your return."
As they talked Martine wondered and wondered who her rescuer could be. Both his language and his subjects of conversation were not what she would have expected from a grocer's boy, for that was what he called himself once or twice, and in the back of the wagon there was a large kerosene can, with one or two empty boxes, as well as some packages that certainly looked like groceries. But she did not waste much time in speculating, because she found so many things to ask that she had never thought to ask any one else before.
"Didn't realize that the first mill on the Continent was built at Annapolis?"—said her companion, "and you from Chicago, where people are supposed to think and dream about flour and grain? I am surprised. And you didn't know that Membertou, that old Indian, is reckoned the first convert made in America? Dear me, where have you been brought up?"
"Oh, I'm learning," responded Martine. "I'd never heard about the Acadians until we came down here. But now I think they're just great; don't you?"
"I should hardly call them great," returned the other, with a smile, "although there's any amount of interesting history connected with them; but I've always taken more interest myself in the early days of Port Royal than in the exile of the Acadians. I wish they'd change the name of Goat Island back to Biencourtville, for that's what it's called on Lescarbot's map."
"Oh," replied Martine, not knowing what else to say.
She knew nothing about Lescarbot and less about his map, but she didn't wish to display her ignorance.
"I remember Biencourt," she added meekly; "he had a very hard time, hadn't he?"
The face of the other brightened.