grass and weed saw it slowly sucked down by the weight of the heavy belt of cartridges round its waist, till it vanished into the awful unfathomed depths below, where no human eye could see it, no human power reach it. Then the canoe lying higher up was seized, soon shaken from its resting place and floated merrily down the current, out into the rush where the fight between the tide and river waged fiercest. And then the waves turned with the bravery born of success upon a new object. Menteith, the fascination of the dreadful spot being gone, rose with a sigh and turned his steps towards his own boat. As if Heaven had sent its own veil, solely for the purpose of shrouding the deed of its own executioner, the mist slowly rose, and the morning sun shone as brightly on rock, and lighthouse, and river, with the fair bay of Tadousac glinting and sparkling in the distance, with its white hotel not yet awake, and its quaint and ancient little church standing out boldly against a background of grey mountain and yellow sand ridge, just as though no minister of God's justice had visited the spot in the early dawn of day.

CE

CHAPTER III.

HRISTMAS Eve in Quebec ; quaint, dear, old, historic Quebec. The city is looking at its very best as the representative city of a land where snow reigns for a third of the year. Other cities may boast of summer charms, but Quebec, glorious under its summer sun, is enchanting under its winter snows. All is life and fun and bustle to-night, and the streets, where the snow is so dry with frost that it is kicked before the foot of the passer-by like sand, are filled with crowds of people making preparation for the genial morrow. Fabrique

Street and St. Johns are alive with sleighs dashing along the narrow road

way or cleverly creeping up the icy slope past the Esplanade. From farms and villages, dotted all about the white landscape and snugly perched on the sides of the mountain ranges which guard the city; from straggling Beauport, from St. Foye and the two Lorettes, come sleighs of all kinds and fashions, from the queer little red cariole of the small farmer, with its coarse buffalo robes, to the well-appointed graceful vehicle whose glossy black bear-skin sweeps the snow behind it. The air is melodious with the sound of sleigh bells. Here, tuned to a sweet harmonious jangle, a group, silver-gilt, red-tasselled, adorns the proud backs of the splendid greys which are whirling wealth home from its Christmas-tree shopping, while close by there comes a single, feeble tinkle from the neck of a plucky little beast which is drawing a load of wood for Christmas fires on a home-made traineau, and whose owner, red-capped and blanket-coated, trudges patiently by its side with many a cheering 'va done!' meditating hopefully on the prospects of a sale.

Looking down from Durham Terrace, the warm lights peeping from under the steep tin-covered roofs of the houses far below, upon which the snow cannot rest, the wide stretch of the river, now bearing not a ship on her dark cold bosom, but not yet frozen over, though soon to be so if the Fates are kind; the high banks and houses of Levis, snow-covered but dotted with fire-light and lamp-light across the water, with all their suggestions of life and cheerfulness, cold and misery, of man defying nature, and nature, still and deadly, biding her time to catch him unawares. All these things make up a picture upon which a man may look long and think long. From one of the windows of a house close by a man was looking and thinking; for the better part of four months he had had but little chance of doing either.

When Colin Menteith, guided by

instinct, stumbled in a foolish drunken fashion into the stern of the fisherman's boat, where his friends were awaiting him, he fell into a sleep which lasted till, one day his natural self awoke once more, to find a body so weakened that not a muscle could be found with strength to lift a finger from the bed on which he was lying; with all his brown curly hair clipped and shaved off, and with cheeks so sunken and eyes so hollow that it was only a matter of wonder that the soul ever found again a body so much changed for the worse. He had had an attack of brain fever. Fortunately, Cranstoun was in the boat when he had reached it, and, comprehending more than he saw, he had conveyed his poor friend up to Quebec, though with infinite difficulty, till he was able to place him in comfortable quarters, and under medical care. How terrible had been the struggle for life, when, the brain on fire with excitement, allowed no moment of rest to the poor worn-out body. Seeing, with the vividness of its original horrible reality, a struggle with a foe who did not exist, feeling the stabs of a knife which was not even a shadow, heaving up on high, in arms which soon ceased to possess the power of raising even themselves, the sinewy athletic frame of his phantom opponent-hearing that horrible scream of agony, the voice of the real 'homme qui crie,' ringing through ears which in truth heard nothing; and then, with one superhuman effort, dashing the hateful form on to the cold wet rocks, when his own bed was the hardest spot present to receive the creature of his fancy-what wonder that, strong man as he was, mind destroyed matter and life hung by a thread. for hours, he would sit up in his bed perfectly still, watching with glaring eyes the twirling of eddies and currents as they rushed with resistless force around and around-poor soul! -his bedroom. He would look on, panting, while the dreadful head,

Then,

His

with its load of brown hair nodded backwards and forwards in the playful clutch of the waves, and as it slid away to join the merry dance of driftwood he would shriek at it till it vanished from a gaze which had known nothing of its presence into a whirl of water which existed only in imagination. Then he would begin the whole scene over again! Fortunately no particular excitement had been caused by the disappearance of Frank Devor. He had gone out in a birch bark canoe, to shoot on the reef, before daybreak, a rash thing for a novice to do at any time, and a particularly rash act in a heavy mist. canoe had been found, half filled with water, far down the river, it was empty. A sad accident' had occurred, and Mr. Devor was 'drowned.' So the newspapers said, and they ought to know. The Saguenay River contradicted the story. The doctors at Quebec, of whom Cranstoun anxiously enquired respecting the origin. of these strange hallucinations of his friend's brain, were quite authoritative upon the subject; and their lucid explanations of how, in inflammatory disease of the brain, the ganglia connecting the sensory nerves from the eye with the cerebral centres of vision and the gray matter of the frontal convolutions, were capable of producing most realistic impressions upon the brain, which had no element of reality in fact, were most edifying and satisfactory to the listener. Mr. Cranstoun's friend had probably, they conjectured, been a great reader of novels. Mr. Cranstoun admitted that he was.

As Menteith, sitting, weakly enough, but still sanely, in his invalid's chair, looks dreamily out in the depressing dusk of evening into the cold world beyond his window, the warm firelight and lighted lamps within trying in vain to coax him into kindlier thoughts, a tiny tap comes to his door, and, after a severe struggle with the

handle, a little three-year-old girl puts her golden head into the room, and having entered, and, with a backward push of her whole small body's weight, shut the door with a loud slam, a delicate notification to the invalid's ears of her presence there, and one duly appreciated, says, by way probably of a concession to the politenesses of society, May I tum in?'

'Tum in, indeed!' he says. "Well, I should say you are in already. What do you think?'

They both laugh over this big joke, and the mite, who carries a doll with the pinkest of cheeks, tawniest of hair and bluest of eyes, cuddled up to her own wee breast like the miniature woman she is, to say nothing of a big picture book of nursery tales under the other arm, runs across the room to his chair, and, first depositing her load upon his knees, noisily drags another chair to his side as a means of mounting to the same blissful emi

all the response she makes to his appeal.

'Some more is there? On with the steam then.'

His hand involuntarily plays about his watch-chain, and the locket his fingers open shows a fair young girl face opposite to a lock of soft, brown hair, wonderfully like to the face of the little maiden in her white frock, with its blue sash around her tiny waist, standing opposite to him.

With a gulp for a fresh stock of breath she goes on

'The tin' was in his tountin' house
Tountin' out his money,

The tween was in the parlour

Eatin' bed an honey,

The maid was in the darden
Hanin' out the tees,
Tame a 'ittle bat-bird

And nipped off her nose.'

enough for a few cents to make a book of forty or fifty pages. You can see the stuff I mean in small jars on the apothecary's counter. It is used for sticking on labels, and it is a clean and almost transparent substance. You never have any trouble with it. It is always available, and if, from long standing, it should become dry, a tablespoonful of hot or cold water will soon make it all right again, and reduce it to the proper consistence for immediate use. If you want to make the paste yourself, all you have to do is to ask at your druggist's for half

an

ounce of pure gum tragacanth and a quarter of an ounce of gum acacia. Mix these together in a cup, and pour water over them. In an

hour or two the paste will be ready, and I have never known it to prove unsatisfactory.

In making your scrap-book you should aim at variety, and as there are plenty of coloured pictures to be had at small prices, there can be no difficulty in securing that end. Do not fill your book with pictures either, but pay particular attention to your reading matter. There are hundreds of pretty poems going about in the newspapers, numberless anecdotes of famous personages, cute little stories, funny paragraphs, sketches of people and clever newspaper criticisms of men, women and books, and from these materials it is a very easy thing, for any one of taste, to make quite an acceptable volume of the brightest things to be had. I know a young friend of mine who has been making scrap-books for five years, and she has no less than ten complete volumes, and a new one partly under way now. I never tire of looking at them. I think one can hardly do better during the coming winter evenings than spend an odd hour, now and then, in the very enjoyable occupation of making a scrap-book. The pleasure afterwards will amply repay all the trouble you may go to.

SOPHIE.

-Just about this time everybody has been wishing everybody else, a Merry Christmas, and family parties have met to discuss the regulation turkey and plum pudding, and surprises, more or less successful, have been contrived, and all well-conditioned persons have been doing their best in looks, and speech, and behaviour, to do honour to the grest fête day of the year. And, no doubt, some of those more philosophical and 'advanced' individuals, whose mission it seems to be to make simple folk uncomfortable, have been moralising, inwardly, if not outwardly, on the hollowness and conventionality of the whole thing, and wondering how long this highly developed age, with its 'culture' and common sense, is going to keep up so childish an observance. Well, we may at once admit that the

merry Christmas' is often a mere formality, that the average Christmas party is often a very common-place affair, that Christmas gifts are not always the spontaneous tokens of affection, but are often rather a heavy tax on the slender resources of ill-furnished purses, and that it is by no means common for long absent and long estranged prodigal sons, or husbands, or brothers, to return appropriately, on the eve of Christmas day, as they invariably do in the blessed realm of story-land. What then! We don't have ideal Christmases any more than we have ideal lives. We have them to match these very commonplace and imperfect lives and characters of ours; but though they partake, as they needs must, of human imperfection, it does not at all follow that we should be better without them. No let us be thankful for our Christmas day, even apart from the great event which it more specially commemorates, and in honour of which we chant our Christmas song. Let us be thankful that, even in the scientific reign of Professor Huxley and his disciples, this great Christian observance keeps its place, a witness to the power of mind over matter, and to the deathless