Legare and Esdras attacked the smaller ones with no weapons but their axes and stout wooden Prizes.  They first cut the roots spreading on the surface, then drove a lever well home, and, chests against the bar, threw all their weight upon it.  When their efforts could not break the hundred ties binding the tree to the soil Legare continued to bear heavily that he might raise the stump a little, and while he groaned and grunted under the strain Esdras hewed away furiously level with the ground, severing one by one the remaining roots.

A little distance away the other three men handled the stumping-machine with the aid of Charles Eugene.  The pyramidal scaffolding was put in place above a large stump and lowered, the chains which were then attached to the root passed over a pulley, and the horse at the other end started away quickly, flinging himself against the traces and showering earth with his hoofs.  A short and desperate charge, a mad leap often arrested after a few feet as by the stroke of fist; then the heavy steel blades a giant would swing up anew, gleaming in the sun, and fall with a dull sound upon the stubborn wood, while the horse took breath for a moment, awaiting with excited eye the word that would launch him forward again.  And afterwards there was still the labour of hauling or rolling the big stumps to the pile-at fresh effort of back, of soil-stained hands with swollen veins, and stiffened arms that seemed grotesquely striving with the heavy trunk and the huge twisted roots.

The sun dipped toward the horizon, disappeared; the sky took on softer hues above the forest’s dark edge, and the hour of supper brought to the house five men the of the colour of the soil.

While waiting Upon them Madame Chapdelaine asked a hundred questions about the day’s work, and when the vision arose before her of this patch of land they had cleared, superbly bare, lying ready for the Plough, her spirit was possessed with something of a mystic’s rapture.

With hands upon her hips, refusing to seat herself at table, she extolled the beauty Of the world as it existed for her:  not the beauty wherein human beings have no hand, which the townsman makes such an ado about with his unreal ecstasies.-mountains, lofty and bare, wild seas-but the quiet unaffected loveliness of the level champaign, finding its charm in the regularity of the long furrow and the sweetly-flowing stream—­the naked champaign courting with willing abandon the fervent embraces of the sun.

She sang the great deeds of the four Chapdelaines and Edwige Legare, their struggle against the savagery of nature, their triumph of the day.  She awarded praises and displayed her own proper pride, albeit the five men smoked their wooden or clay pipes in silence, motionless as images after their long task; images of earthy hue, hollow-eyed with fatigue.

“The stumps are hard to get out.” at length said the elder Chapdelaine, “the roots have not rotted in the earth so much as I should have imagined.  I calculate that we shall not be through for three weeks.”  He glanced questioningly at Legare who gravely confirmed him.