tin spires and house-tops burning through the coppery morning fog, until my mind’s eye became telescopic, and my thoughts, unsentimental though I be, reverted to civilized society and its agrements, and particularly to a certain steep-roofed cottage situated on a suburban road, in the boudoirs of which I liked to imagine one pined for my return.  If memory has its pleasures, has it not also its glimpses of regret?—­and who can say that the former compensate for the latter?  Even now I see her as she used to step out on the veranda,—­the lithe Indian girl, rivalling the choicest “desert-flower” of Arabia in the rich darkness of her eyes and hair, and in the warm mantling of her golden-ripe complexion,—­unutterably graceful in the thorough-bred ease of her elastic movements,—­Zosime MacGillivray, perfect type and model of the style and beauty of the brulee.  She was the only child of a retired trader of the old North-West Fur Company and his Indian wife; had been partly educated in England; possessed rather more than the then average Colonial allowance of accomplishments; and was, altogether, so much in harmony with my roving forest-inclinations, that I sometimes thought, half seriously, how pleasant and respectable it would be to have one such at the head of one’s camp-equipage, and how much nicer a companion she would be on a hunt than that disreputable old scoundrel, Zach Hiver.

“Pack the tobaugan, Zach!  The sun will come out strong by and by, and the longer we tarry here, the heavier the snow will be for our stretch to the Citadel.  Up, there! leve-toi, cochon!” shouted I, in the elegant terms of address which experience had taught me were the only ones that had any effect upon the stolid sensibilities of the half-breed,—­at the same time administering to him a kick that produced a thud and a grunt, as if actually bestowed on the unclean quadruped to which I had just likened him.  The ragamuffin was very slow this time in getting the traps together on the tobaugan, and, if I had not attended to the matter myself, the moose trophy, at least, would in all probability have been left to perish, and would never have pointed a moral and adorned a tale, as it now does, in its exalted position among the reminiscences of things past.  At length we got under way, and, as a walk over the open plain offered a pleasing variety to a man who had been feeling his way so long through the dim old woods, I determined to descend from the ridge of Beauport, and proceed over the snow-covered surface of the bay, in a bird’s-eye line, to our point of destination.  Winding down the almost perpendicular declivity, sometimes sliding down on our snow-shoes, with the tobaugan running before us, “on its own hook,” at a fearful pace, and sometimes obliged to descend, hand under hand, by the tangled roots and shrubs, we soon found ourselves on the great white winter-prairie of the grand St. Lawrence, upon which I strode forward with renewed energy, steering my course, like the primitive steeple-chasers of my boyhood’s home, upon the highest church-tower looming up from the heterogeneous huddle of motley houses that just showed their gable-tops over the low ring of mist which mingled with the smoke of the Lower Town.