Gaspard’s farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long.  It was one of several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights east of Beauport which rise to Montmorenci Falls.  He had his front on the greater stream, and his inland boundary among woods skirting the mountain.  He raised his food and the tobacco he smoked, and braided his summer hats of straw and knitted his winter caps of wool.  One suit of well-fulled woolen clothes would have lasted a habitant a lifetime.  But Gaspard had been unlucky.  He lost all his family by smallpox, and the priest made him burn his clothes, and ruinously fit himself with new.  There was no use in putting savings in the stocking any longer, however; the children were gone.  He could only buy masses for them.  He lived alone, the neighbors taking that loving interest in him which French Canadians bestow on one another.

More than once Gaspard thought he would leave his farm and go into the world.  When Frontenac returned to take the paralyzed province in hand, and fight Iroquois, and repair the mistakes of the last governor, Gaspard put on his best moccasins and the red tasseled sash he wore only at Christmas.  “Gaspard is going to the fort,” ran along the whole row of Beauport houses.  His neighbors waited for him.  They all carried their guns and powder for the purpose of firing salutes to Frontenac.  It was a grand day.  But when Gaspard stepped out with the rest, his countenance fell.  He could not tell what ailed him.  His friends coaxed and pulled him; they gave him a little brandy.  He sat down, and they were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks themselves.  From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion’s, ship come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man need not leave his place to take part in the world.

Frontenac had not been back a month, and here was the New England colony of Massachusetts swarming against New France.  “They may carry me away from my hearth feet first,” thought Gaspard, “but I am not to be scared away from it.”

Every night, before putting the bar across his door, the old habitant went out to survey the two ends of the earth typified by the road crossing his strip of farm.  These were usually good moments for him.  He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve him of labor.  A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow of Beauport.  The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste. Anne de Beaupre, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine in New France.  The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed the long slope to Quebec rock.

Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk.  Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and calf.  To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual.  He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.