Madame Chapdelaine, liking him, and feeling a great sympathy for his solitary labour in this worthy cause, gave him a few words of encouragement.  “You don’t make very quick progress by yourself, that is true enough, but a man lives on very little when he is alone, and then your brother Egide will be coming back from the drive with two or three hundred dollars at least, in time for the hay-making and the harvest, and, if you both stay here next winter, in less than two years you will have a good farm.”

Assenting with a nod, his glance found Maria, as though drawn thither by the thought that in two years, fortune favouring, he might hope.

“How does the drive go?” asked Esdras.  “Is there any news from that quarter?”

“I had word through Ferdina Larouche, a son of Thadee Larouche of Honfleur, who got back from La Tuque last month.  He said that things were going well; the men were not having too bad a time.”

The shanties, the drive, these are the two chief heads of the great lumbering industry, even of greater importance for the Province of Quebec than is farming.  From October till April the axes never cease falling, while sturdy horses draw the logs over the snow to the banks of the frozen rivers; and, when spring comes, the piles melt one after another into the rising waters and begin their long adventurous journey through the rapids.  At every abrupt turn, at every fall, where logs jam and pile, must be found the strong and nimble river-drivers, practised at the dangerous work, at making their way across the floating timber, breaking the jams, aiding with ax and pike-pole the free descent of this moving forest.

“A hard time!” exclaimed Legare with scorn.  “The young fellows of to-day don’t know the meaning of the words.  After three months in the woods they are in a hurry to get home and buy yellow boots, stiff hats and cigarettes, and to go and see their girls.  Even in the shanties, as things are now, they are as well fed as in a hotel, with meat and potatoes all winter long.  Now, thirty years ago ...”

He broke off for a moment, expressing with a shake of his head those prodigious changes that the years had wrought.

“Thirty years ago. when the railway from Quebec was built, I was there; that was something like hardship, I can tell you!  I was only sixteen years of age but I chopped with the rest of them to clear the right of way, always twenty-five miles ahead of the steel, and for fourteen months I never clapped eye on a house.  We had no tents, summer or winter, only shelters of boughs that we made for ourselves.  And from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop,—­eaten by the flies, and in the course of the same day soaked with rain and roasted by the sun.”

“Every Monday morning they opened a sack of flour and we made ourselves a bucketful of pancakes, and all the rest of the week, three times a day, one dug into that pail for something to eat.  By Wednesday, no longer any pancakes, because they were all stuck together; nothing there but a mass of dough.  One cut off a big chunk of dough with one’s knife, put that in his belly, and then chopped and chopped again!”