the old stockade, nearly every evening met the beauties of Green Bay at Pierre Grignon’s, and if he did not fiddle for them he led Madame in the dancing.  The grandmother herself sometimes took her stick and stepped through a measure to please the young people.  Laughter and the joy of life filled the house every waking hour of the twenty-four.  Funerals were never horrible there.  Instead, they seemed the mystic beginning of better things.

“Poor Madame Tank!  She would have been so much more comfortable in her death if she had relieved her mind,” Madame Ursule said, the first evening, as we sat in a pause of the dancing.  “She used to speak of you often, for seeing you made a great impression upon her, and she never let us forget you.  I am sure she knew more about you than she ever told me.  ‘I have an important disclosure to make,’ she says.  ’Come around me, I want all of you to hear it!’ Then she fell back and died without telling it.”

A touch of mystery was not lacking to the house.  Several times I saw the tail of a gray gown disappear through an open door.  Some woman half entered and drew back.

“It’s Madeleine Jordan,” an inmate told me each time.  “She avoids strangers.”

I asked if Madeleine Jordan was a relative.

“Oh, no,” Madame Ursule replied; “but the family who brought her here, went back to Canada, and of course they left her with us.”

Of course Madeleine Jordan, or anybody else who lacked a roof, would be left with the Grignons; but in that house a hermit seemed out of place, and I said so to Madame Ursule.

“Poor child!” she responded.  “I think she likes the bustle and noise.  She is not a hermit.  What difference can it make to her whether people are around her or not?”

The subject of Madeleine Jordan was no doubt beyond a man’s handling.  I had other matters to think about, and directly plunged into them.  First the Menominees and Winnebagoes must be assembled in council.  They held all the desirable land.

“We don’t like your Indian scheme in Green Bay,” said Pierre Grignon.  “But if the tribes here are willing to sell their lands, other settlers can’t prevent it.”

He went with me to meet the savages on the opposite side of the Fox near the stockade.  There the talking and eating lasted two days.  At the end of that time I had a footing for our Iroquois in the Wisconsin portion of the Illinois Territory; and the savages who granted it danced a war dance in our honor.  Every brave shook over his head the scalps he had taken.  I saw one cap of soft long brown hair.

“Eh!” said Pierre Grignon, sitting beside me.  “Their dirty trophies make you ghastly!  Do your eastern tribes never dance war dances?”

After the land was secured its boundaries had to be set.  Then my own grant demanded attention; and last, I was anxious to put my castle on it before snow flew.  Many of those late autumn nights Skenedonk and I spent camping.  The outdoor life was a joy to me.  Our land lay up the Fox River and away from the bay.  But more than one stormy evening, when we came back to the bay for supplies, I plunged into the rolling water and swam breasting the waves.  It is good to be hardy, and sane, and to take part in the visible world, whether you are great and have your heart’s desire or not.