In the same way our host provided a supper and bed with armies of invisible servants.  Skenedonk climbed a ladder to the loft with our saddlebags.

“Where is that chambermaid?” cried the tavern keeper.

“Yes, where is she?” said a man who lounged on a bench by the entrance.  “I’ve heard of her so often I would like to see her myself.”

The landlord, deaf to raillery, bustled about and spread our table in his public room.

“Corn bread, hominy, side meat, ven’zin,” he shouted in the kitchen.  “Stir yourself, you black rascal, and dish up the gentleman’s supper.”

Skenedonk walked boldly to the kitchen door and saw our landlord stewing and broiling, performing the offices of cook as he had performed those of stableman.  He kept on scolding and harrying the people who should have been at his command:—­“Step around lively, Sam.  Tell the gentleman the black bottle is in the fireplace cupboard if he wants to sharpen his appetite.  Where is that little nigger that picks up chips?  Bring me some more wood from the wood-pile!  I’ll teach you to go to sleep behind the door!”

Our host served us himself, running with sleeves turned back to admonish an imaginary cook.  His tap-room was the fireplace cupboard, and it was visited while we ate our supper, by men in elkskin trousers, and caps and hooded capotes of blue cloth.  These Canadians mixed their own drink, and made a cross-mark on the inside of the cupboard door, using a system of bookkeeping evidently agreed upon between themselves and the landlord.  He shouted for the lazy barkeeper, who answered nothing out of nothingness.

Nightfall was very clear and fair in this Northwestern territory.  A man felt nearer to the sunset.  The region took hold upon me:  particularly when one who was neither a warehouseman nor a Canadian fur hunter, hurried in and took me by the hand.

“I am Pierre Grignon,” he said.

Indeed, if he had held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel de Chaumont climbed the chimney.

We sat and talked until the light faded.  The landlord brought a candle, and yelled up the loft, where Skenedonk had already stretched himself in his blanket, as he loved to do: 

“Chambermaid, light up!”

“You drive your slaves too hard, landlord,” said Pierre Grignon.

“You’d think I hadn’t any, Mr. Grignon; for they’re never in the way when they’re wanted.”

“One industrious man you certainly have.”

“Yes, Sam is a good fellow; but I’ll have to go out and wake him up and make him rub the horses down.”

“Never mind,” said Pierre Grignon.  “I’m going to take these travelers home with me.”

“Now I know how a tavern ought to be kept,” said the landlord.  “But what’s the use of my keeping one if Pierre Grignon carries off all the guests?”