By-and-by they slept,—­two of them outside, by the fire,—­Falardeau inside the wigwam, the repose of which was broken by the hollow rattle of his drunken breath.

In the dead of the night something clutched me by the arm.  It was the ugly squaw, who forced a greasy butcher-knife into my hand, pointing towards where the raftsman lay, and whispering to me in English,—­“Stick heem! stick heem!—­nobody never know.  He kill my brother long time ago with this old knife.  Kill heem! kill heem now!”

I did not avail myself of the opportunity thus afforded me for the improvement of river society:  nay, worse, I connived at the further career of the redoubtable Rupert Falardeau, Junior; for, on leaving in the morning, I roused him with repeated kicks, thus saving him for that time, probably, from the Damoclesian blade of the vengeresse.

L’ete de Saint Martin!—­how blue and yellow it is in the marshes in those days!  It is the name given by the French Canadians to the Indian Summer,—­the Summer of St. Martin, whose anniversary-day falls upon the eleventh of November; though the brief latter-day tranquillity called after him arrives, generally, some two or three weeks earlier.  Looking lakeward from the sedgy nook in which we are waiting for the coming of the wood-ducks, the low line of water, blue and calm, is broken at intervals by the rise of the distant masquallonge, as he plays for a moment on the surface.  But the channels that separate the flat, alluvial islets are yellow, their sluggish waters being bedded heavily down with the broad leaves of the wintering basswood-trees, which, in some places, touch branch-tips across the narrow straits.  The muskrat’s hut is thatched with the wet, dead leaves,—­no thanks to him; and there is a mat of them before his door,—­a heavy, yellow mat, on which are scattered the azure shells of the fresh-water clams to be found so often upon the premises of this builder.  Does he sup on them, or are they only the cups and saucers of his vegeto-aquarian menage?  Blue and yellow all,—­the sky and the sedge-rows, the calm lake and the canoe, the plashing basswood-leaves and the oval, azure shells.

Also Marance, the voyageur’s buxom young daughter, who came with us, today, commissioned to cull herbs of wondrous properties among the vine-tangled thickets of the islands.  Blue and yellow.  Eyes blue as the azure shells; hair flashing out golden gleams, like that of Pyrrha, when she braided hers so featly for the coming of some ambrosial boy.

“I must marry you, Marance,” said I, jocularly, to the damsel, as I jumped her out of the canoe,—­“I shall marry you when we get back.”

It is good to live in a marsh.  No fast boarding-house women there, lurking for the unwary; no breaches of promise; “no nothing” in the old-man-trap line.  Abjure fast boarding-houses, you silly old bachelors, and go to grass in a marsh!