Subsequently, I tried many times to trace it, but without success.  Many strangers visit Lorette during the summer season, and it is possible that some virtuoso, struck by the associative value of the relic, may have prevailed on its owner to part with it for a consideration.  There are people who would have possessed themselves of it without the exchange of a consideration.  Should this meet the eye of its present possessor, and if so be that the medal came into his hands on the consideration principle, so that he need not be ashamed of it, he will confer a favor by giving the correct reading of the Indian name.  For “Toussahissa,” as I have rendered it, is not exact, but only as near as I can make it out from my pencil-memoranda, which, written in a note-book that did occasional duty as a fly-book, have been partially obliterated in that spot by the contact of a large and remarkably gaudy salmon-fly, whose repose between the leaves is disturbed, perhaps, by aquatic nightmares of salmon gaping at him from whirling eddies.

Between Lorette and the unexplored wilderness that stretches away to polar desolation there is but a narrow selvage of civilization.  Looking toward it from my windows at Quebec, I could see the blue, serrated ridge of highlands beyond which the surveyor has never yet run his lines,—­beyond which the surveyor’s lines would be superfluous, indeed, and futile; for the soil is of the barren, rocky kind, and the timber of the scrubby.  Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the shaggy bison at his window, or the incursion of the redoubtable “grizzly” into his wood-shed where the elk-meat hung.  But, in the clear, cold nights that precede the punctual and distinct winter of these regions, the black bears often come down from their fastnesses amid the wild ridges, and astonish the drowsy habitant and his household by their pranks among his pigs and calves:  also in the spring.

In a small settlement of this wild tract, a few miles to the north-east of Lorette, there dwelt, some six or seven years ago, a poor farmer named Cantin, who added to the meagre fare afforded by his sterile acres such stray birds and hares as he could get within range of his old musket, without risking himself very far away from the isolated clearing.  One night in the early part of May, when the snow had disappeared from the open grounds, but lingered yet in the ravines and rocky thickets, a dreadful tumult among the cattle of the settlement indicated the presence of bear.  Cantin had the old firelock ready, but the night was dark and unfavorable for active measures.  At gray morning, traces of the nocturnal intruder were visible, and that close by the cabane in which Cantin lived, in the little inclosure near which a struggle had evidently taken place, resulting in the discomfiture