Young Hugh turned suddenly to his mother.  “I’m at peace now.  You and Dad—­honor me.  I’ll deserve respect from—­my country.  It will be a wall around me—­And—­” he caught her to him and crushed his mouth to hers—­“dearest—­Brock will hold my hand.”

THE SILVER STIRRUP

In the most unexpected spots vital sparks of history blaze out.  Time seems, once in a while, powerless to kill a great memory.  Romance blooms sometimes untarnished across centuries of commonplace.  In a new world old France lives.

* * * * *

It is computed that about one-seventh of the French-Canadian population of Canada enlisted in the great war.  The stampede of heroism seems to have left them cold.  A Gospel of the Province first congealed the none too fiery blood of the habitants, small farmers, very poor, thinking in terms of narrowest economy, of one pig and ten children, of painstaking thrift and a bare margin to subsistence.  Such conditions stifle world interests.  The earthquake which threatened civilization disturbed the habitant merely because it hazarded his critical balance on the edge of want.  The cataclysm over the ocean was none of his affair.  And his affairs pressed.  What about the pig if one went to war?  And could Alphonse, who is fourteen, manage the farm so that there would be vegetables for winter?  Tell me that.

When in September, 1914, I went to Canada for two weeks of camping I had heard of this point of view.  Dick Lindsley and I were met at the Club Station on the casual railway which climbs the mountains through Quebec Province, by four guides, men from twenty to thirty-five, powerfully built chaps, deep-shouldered and slim-waisted, lithe as wild-cats.  It was a treat to see their muscles, like machines in the pink of order, adjust to the heavy pacquetons, send a canoe whipping through the water.  There was one exception to the general physical perfection; one of Dick’s men, a youngster of perhaps twenty-two, limped.  He covered ground as well as the others, for all of that; he picked the heaviest load and portaged it at an uneven trot, faster than his comrades; he was what the habitants call “ambitionne.”  Dick’s canoe was loaded first, owing to the fellow’s efficiency, and I waited while it got away and watched the lame boy.  He had an interesting face, aquiline and dark, set with vivid light-blue eyes, shooting restless fire.  I registered an intention to get at this lad’s personality.  The chance came two days later.  My men were off chopping on a day, and I suddenly needed to go fishing.

“Take Philippe,” offered Dick.  “He handles a boat better than any of them.”

Philippe and I shortly slipped into the Guardian’s Pool, at the lower end of the long lake of the Passes.  “It is here, M’sieur,” Philippe announced, “that it is the custom to take large ones.”