The Ruling Passion: Tales of Nature and Human Nature

by Henry Van Dyke

The reply was so unexpected that it almost took my breath away. For Pat, the steady smoker, whose pipes were as invariable as the precession of the equinoxes, to refuse his regular rations of the soothing weed was a thing unheard of. Could he be growing proud in his old age? Had he some secret supply of cigars concealed in his kit, which made him scorn the golden Virginia leaf? I demanded an explanation.

“But no, m’sieu’,” he replied; “it is not that, most assuredly. It is something entirely different—something very serious. It is a reformation that I commence. Does m’sieu’ permit that I should inform him of it?”

Of course I permitted, or rather, warmly encouraged, the fullest possible unfolding of the tale; and while we sat among the bags and boxes, and the sun settled gently down behind the sharp-pointed firs across the lake, and the evening sky and the waveless lake glowed with a thousand tints of deepening rose and amber, Patrick put me in possession of the facts which had led to a moral revolution in his life.

“It was the Ma’m’selle Meelair, that young lady,—not very young, but active like the youngest,—the one that I conducted down the Grande Decharge to Chicoutimi last year, after you had gone away. She said that she knew m’sieu’ intimately. No doubt you have a good remembrance of her?”

I admitted an acquaintance with the lady. She was the president of several societies for ethical agitation—a long woman, with short hair and eyeglasses and a great thirst for tea; not very good in a canoe, but always wanting to run the rapids and go into the dangerous places, and talking all the time. Yes; that must have been the one. She was not a bosom friend of mine, to speak accurately, but I remembered her well.

“Well, then, m’sieu’,” continued Patrick, “it was this demoiselle who changed my mind about the smoking. But not in a moment, you understand; it was a work of four days, and she spoke much.

“The first day it was at the Island House; we were trolling for ouananiche, and she was not pleased, for she lost many of the fish. I was smoking at the stern of the canoe, and she said that the tobacco was a filthy weed, that it grew in the devil’s garden, and that it smelled bad, terribly bad, and that it made the air sick, and that even the pig would not eat it.”

I could imagine Patrick’s dismay as he listened to this dissertation; for in his way he was as sensitive as a woman, and he would rather have been upset in his canoe than have exposed himself to the reproach of offending any one of his patrons by unpleasant or unseemly conduct.

“What did you do then, Pat?” I asked.

“Certainly I put out the pipe—what could I do otherwise? But I thought that what the demoiselle Meelair has said was very strange, and not true—exactly; for I have often seen the tobacco grow, and it springs up out of the ground like the wheat or the beans, and it has beautiful leaves, broad and green, with sometimes a red flower at the top. Does the good God cause the filthy weeds to grow like that? Are they not all clean that He has made? The potato—it is not filthy. And the onion? It has a strong smell; but the demoiselle Meelair she ate much of the onion—when we were not at the Island House, but in the camp.