“Hollo, Button!” said I, in response to his cheery, “How de dew?”—­“On horseback again, I see; have you forgotten the Buffer-business, then?”

“Forgot the yaller cuss!” replied he.  “No, Sir-ree!  He hangs round me yet, like fever ‘n’ agur upon a ma’sh.  But the critter I’m onto a’n’t no dog-hoss, you may believe; he don’t ‘throw off’ nor nothin’, he don’t.  Him and his mate here a’n’t easy matched.  I fetched ’em up from below on spec, and you can hev the span for a cool thousand on ice.”

And this was the last I saw of Button, who was one of the strangest combinations of hotel-keeper, horse-jockey, Indian-trader, fish-monger, and alligator, I ever met.

Tradition still retains a hold upon the Hurons of Lorette, little as remains to them of the character and lineaments of the red man.  A pitiable procession of their diluted “braves” may sometimes be seen in the streets of Quebec, on such distinguished occasions as the Prince’s visit.  But it is with a manifest consciousness of the ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke.  That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of “supes” at one of our theatres.  By-and-by all this will have died out, and the “Indian side” of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other.  The moccason is already typifying the decadence of aboriginal things there.  That article is now fitted with India-rubber soles for the Quebec demand,—­a continuation of the sole running in a low strip round the edge of the foot.  With the gradual widening of that strip, until the moccason of the red man has been clean obliterated from things that are by the India-rubber of the white, will the remnant of the Hurons have passed away with things that were.  Verdict on the “poor Indian":—­“Wiped out with an India-rubber shoe.”

And then, in future generations, the tradition of Indian blood among Canadian families of dark complexion, along these ridges, will be about as vague as that of Spanish descent in the case of certain tribes of fishermen on the western coast of Ireland.  From the assimilation already going on, however, it may be argued that the physical character of the Indian will be gradually merged and lost in that of the French colonist.  The Hurons are described as having formerly been a people of large stature, while those of the present day in Lower Canada are usually rather undersized than otherwise, like their habitant neighbors.  As a race, the latter are below the middle stature, although generally of great bodily strength and endurance.