Edwige Legare had worked for the Chapdelaines these eleven summers.  That is to say, for wages of twenty dollars a month he was in harness each day from four in the morning till nine at night at any and every job that called for doing, bringing to it a sort of frenzied and inexhaustible enthusiasm; for he was one of those men incapable by his nature of working save at the full pitch of strength and energy, in a series of berserk rages.  Short and broad, his eyes were the brightest blue—­a thing rare in Quebec-at once piercing and guileless, set in a visage the colour of clay that always showed cruel traces of the razor, topped by hair of nearly the same shade.  With a pride in his appearance that was hard to justify he shaved himself two or three times a week, always in the evening, before the bit of looking-glass that hung over the pump and by the feeble light of the little lamp-driving the steel through his stiff beard with groans that showed what it cost him m labour and anguish.  Clad in shirt and trousers of brownish homespun, wearing huge dusty boots, he was from head to heel of a piece with the soil, nor was there aught in his face to redeem the impression of rustic uncouthness.

Chapdelaine, his three sons and man, proceeded then to “make land.”  The forest still pressed hard upon the buildings they had put up a few years earlier:  the little square house, the barn of planks that gaped apart, the stable built of blackened logs and chinked with rags and earth.  Between the scanty fields of their clearing and the darkly encircling woods lay a broad stretch which the ax had but half-heartedly attacked.  A few living trees had been cut for timber, and the dead ones, sawn and split, fed the great stove for a whole winter; but the place was a rough tangle of stumps and interlacing roots, of fallen trees too far rotted to burn, of others dead but still erect amid the alder scrub.

Thither the five men made their way one morning and set to work at once, without a word, for every man’s task had been settled beforehand.

The father and Da’Be took their stand face to face on either side of a tree, and their axes, helved with birch, began to swing in rhythm.  At first each hewed a deep notch, chopping steadily at the same spot for some seconds, then the ax rose swiftly and fell obliquely on the trunk a foot higher up; at every stroke a great chip flew, thick as the hand, splitting away with the grain.  When the cuts were nearly meeting, one stopped and the other slowed down, leaving his ax in the wood for a moment at every blow; the mere strip, by some miracle still holding the tree erect, yielded at last, the trunk began to lean and the two axmen stepped back a pace and watched it fall, shouting at the same instant a warning of the danger.