"'Devil's wench!' exclaimed my late father, 'is that your gratitude for my _de profundis_ and all my other prayers? You'd drag _me_ into the orgie, would you? I was thinking you must have been in for at least three or four thousand years of purgatory for your pranks; and you had only killed two husbands--which was a mere nothing. So having always a tender heart for everything, I felt sorry for you, and said to myself we must give you a helping hand. And this is the way you thank me, that you want to straddle my shoulders and ride me to hell like a heretic!' "'My dear Francis,' said La Corriveau, 'take me over to dance with my dear friends;' and she knocked her head against that of my late father till her skull rattled like a dry bladder filled with pebbles. "'You may be sure,' said my late father, 'You hellish wench of Judas Iscariot, I'm not going to be your jackass to carry you over to dance with those pretty darlings!' "'My dear Francis,' answered the witch, 'I can not cross the St. Lawrence, which is a consecrated stream, except with the help of a Christian.' "'Get over as best you can, you devilish gallows bird,' said my late father. 'Get over as best you can; every one to his own business. Oh, yes, a likely thing that I'll carry you over to dance with your dear friends; but that will be a devil of a journey you have come, the Lord knows how, dragging that fine cage of yours, which must have torn up all the stones on the king's highway! A nice row there'll be when the inspector passes this way one of these days and finds the road in such a condition! And then, who but the poor _habitant_ will have to suffer for your frolics, getting fined for not having kept the road properly!' "The drum-major suddenly stopped beating on his great sauce-pan. All the goblins halted and gave three yells, three frightful whoops, like the Indians give when they have danced that war-dance with which they always begin their bloody expeditions. The island was shaken to its foundation, the wolves, the bears, all the other wild beasts, and the demons of the northern mountains took up the cry, and the echoes repeated it till it was lost in the forests of the far-off Saguenay. "My poor, late father thought that the end of the world had come, and the Day of Judgment. "The tall devil with the sauce-pan struck three blows; and a silence most profound succeeded the hellish hubbub. He stretched out his arm toward my late father, and cried with a voice of thunder: 'Will you make haste, you lazy dog? will you make haste, you cur of a Christian, and ferry our friend across? We have only fourteen thousand four hundred times more to prance around the island before cock-crow. Are you going to make her lose the best of the fun?' "'Go to the devil, where you all belong,' answered my late father, losing all patience.