The house of Petit Joliet, upon the hill, burned long alone. It was perhaps a signal to the troops at Piziquid, twenty miles away, telling them that the work at Grand Pré was done. Not till late in the afternoon was the torch set to the village itself. Then smoke arose suddenly on the westernmost outskirts, toward the Habitants dyke. The wind being from the southeast, the fire spread but slowly against it. As the smoke drove low the flames started into more conspicuous brilliance, licking lithely over and under the rolling cloud that strove to smother them. These empty houses burned for the most part with a clear, light flame; but the barns, stored with hay and straw, vomited angry red, streaked with black. Up the bleak hillside ran the terrified cattle, with wildly tossing horns. At times, even on shipboard, we caught their bellowings. They had been turned loose, of course, before the fires were started, but had remained huddled in the familiar barnyards until this horrible and inexplicable cataclysm drove them forth. Far up the slope we saw them turn and stand at gaze. In an hour we observed that the wharf was empty, and the other ship hoisting sail. Then the fires sprang up in every part of the village at once. They ran along the main street below the chapel; but they came not very near the chapel itself, for all the buildings in its immediate neighbourhood had been long ago removed, and it stood in a safe isolation, towering in white solemnity over the red tumult of ruin. “The chapel will be a camp to-night, instead of a prison,” said Marc at my ear, his grave eyes fixed and wide. “It will be the last thing to go—it and the Colony of Compromise yonder up the hill.” “But who shall blame them for the compromise?” I protested, unwilling to hear censure that touched the father of Yvonne. Marc shrugged his shoulders at this. He never was a lover of vain argument. “I wonder where the Black Abbé is at this moment!” was what he said, with no apparent relevancy. “Not yet in his own place, I fear!” said I. “The implication is a pious one,” said Marc. “Yonder is the work of him, and of no other. He should be roasting now in the hottest of it.” I really, at this moment, cared little, and was at loss for reply. But a bullying roar of a voice just behind us saved me the necessity of answering. “Here, you two! What are ye doin’ here on deck? Git, now! Git, quick!” The speaker was a big, loose-jointed man, ill-favoured and palpably ill-humoured. I was pleased to note that the middle two of his obtrusive front teeth were wanting, and that his nose was so misshapen as to suggest some past calamitous experience. As I learned afterwards, this was our ship’s first mate. I was too dull of mood—too sick, in fact—to be instantly wroth at his insolence. I looked curiously at him; but Marc answered in a quiet voice: