“Why didn’t you bury him at home?” asked the boy.  “He was English.”

“Mr. Bates has strict ideas, though he is English.  He wanted it done proper, in a graveyard, by a minister.  He has wrote to the minister at St. Hennon’s and sent money for the burying—­Mr. Bates, he is always particular.”

“You are not going to St. Hennon’s?” said the boy incredulously.  “I’ll stay to-night at Turrifs, and go on in the morning.  It’s four days’ walk for me and the cattle to go and come, but I shall take back a man to cut the trees.”

“Why not send him by the new railroad?”

“It does not stop at Turrifs.”

“Yes; they stop at the cross-roads now, not more than three miles from Turrifs, There’s a new station, and an Englishman set to keep it.  I’ve just brought this sack of flour from there.  M. Didier had it come by the cars.”

“When do they pass to St. Hennon’s?” asked Saul meditatively,—­“But anyway, the Englishman wouldn’t like to take in a coffin.”

“They pass some time in the night; and he must take it in if you write on it where it’s going.  It’s not his business to say what the cars will take, if you pay.”

“Well,” said Saul.  “Good-day.  Yo-hoist!  Yo, yo, ho-hoist!”

It did not seem to him necessary to state whether he was, or was not, going to take the advice offered.  The straining and creaking of the cart, his shouts to the oxen, would have obliterated any further query the boy might have made.  He had fairly moved off when the boy also took up his burden and trudged on the other way.

CHAPTER VIII.

When the blueberry bushes are dry, all the life in them, sucked into their roots against another summer, the tops turn a rich, brownish red; at this time, also, wild bramble thickets have many a crimson stalk that gives colour to their mass, and the twigs that rise above the white trunks of birch trees are not grey, but brown.

Round the new railway station at the cross-roads near Turrifs Settlement, the low-lying land, for miles and miles, was covered with, blueberry bushes; bramble thickets were here and there; and where the land rose a little, in irregular places, young birch woods stood.  If the snow had sprinkled here, as it had upon the hills the night before, there was no sign of it now.  The warm colour of the land seemed to glow against the dulness of the afternoon, not with the sparkle and brightness which colour has in sunshine, but with the glow of a sleeping ember among its ashes.  Round the west there was metallic blue colouring upon the cloud vault.  This colouring was not like a light upon the cloud, it was like a shadow upon it; yet it was not grey, but blue.  Where the long straight road from Turrifs and the long straight road from the hills crossed each other, and were crossed by the unprotected railway track with its endless rows of tree-trunks serving as telegraph poles, the new station stood.