ARCHANGE AND MARIE.
I.—THEIR DISAPPEARANCE.
During the revolutionary war a number of Acadians left the New England States for Canada, preferring monarchic to republican rule. The British authorities provided for these twice-exiled refugees with liberality, giving them free grants of lands and the necessary tools and implements, also supplying them from the nearest military posts with provisions for three years, by which time they would be self-sustaining. Some half dozen families asked for and received lots in the county of Huntingdon and settled together on the shore of the St Lawrence. Accustomed to boating and lumbering in their old Acadian homes, they found profitable exercise in both pursuits in their new, and after making small clearances left their cultivation to the women, while they floated rafts to Montreal or manned the bateaux which carried on the traffic between that place and Upper Canada. The shanty of one of these Acadians, that of Joseph Caza, occupied a point that ran into the great river near the mouth of the LaGuerre.
It was a sunny afternoon towards the end of September and the lake-like expanse of the river, an unruffled sheet of glassy blue, was set in a frame of forest already showing the rich dyes of autumn. It was a scene of intense solitude, for, save the clearance of the hardy settler, no indication of human life met the gaze. There was the lonely stretch of water and the all-embracing forest, and that was all. Playing around the shanty were two sisters, whose gleeful shouts evoked solemn echoes from the depths of the forest, for they were engaged in a game of hide-and-seek amid the rows of tall corn, fast ripening in the sunshine. They were alone, for their father and brothers were away boating and their mother had gone to the beaver-meadow where the cows pastured. Breathless with their play the children sat down to rest, the head of the younger falling naturally into the lap of the older.
“Archange, I know something you don’t.”
“What is it?”
“What we are to have for supper. Mother whispered it to me when she went to milk. Guess?”
“Oh, tell me; I won’t guess.”
“Wheat flour pancakes. I wish she would come; I’m hungry.”