There was a roll of distant thunder; nearer and nearer it came; it grew darker and the air was hot and stifling. The forest groaned, and then there was an appalling crash and a blaze of lightning clad the scene in dazzling sheen. There was the red glow of fire; the bolt had struck a dead pine and instantly the surrounding trees, covered with withered leaves, that caught like tinder, were in a blaze. The storm shrieked, the thunder made the earth tremble, the rain fell in torrents, but higher and higher mounted the flames. It was the funeral pyre of Archange and Marie, and when it died out not a vestige of them was to be found. THE SETTLER’S FIRST GRIST. CHAPTER I. Late in the fall of 1817 seven families of immigrants settled on the banks of the St Lawrence in Dundee, close to the St Anicet line and nearly opposite the village of Lancaster. With one exception, they had come from the Isle of Skye, and they named their settlement after their Scottish birthplace, which was not altogether inappropriate, for the strip of territory they had taken possession of was so surrounded on the land side by swamps as to be, in a sense, an island. Apart from two or three of their number who knew a little English, they spoke Gaelic and Gaelic only. They brought naught beyond strong arms and great endurance of privation, for their training as crofters and fishermen was of little use in their new surroundings. An untrodden wilderness of forest hemmed in their shanties, which were placed on the bank of the St Lawrence, and on the other side of the great river, which here expands into a lake two miles in width, were their nearest neighbors, who had shown them the greatest kindness. Highlanders like themselves, the people on the Glengarry side of the river had taken a lively interest in the newcomers, had made bees to give them a fresh start in life; crossed over the river to show them how to fell trees, build shanties, and make potash, and when spring came had, with true Highland generosity, lent them seed and assisted in brushing it in or planting it amid the stumps of their clearings. In the black mould of the virgin soil the potatoes grew with an abundance that surprised the Skyemen, though their astonishment was greater at the luxuriance of the Indian corn, which they saw for the first time, and at the excellence of the wheat. When the latter was threshed the next step was to get it ground. Their nearest mill was at Williamstown, in the county of Glengarry, and to reach it involved a fatiguing journey. It was a bright morning in the first week of October, 1818, that one of the settlers placed a bag of wheat in a canoe to take to this mill. It was his first grist--the first in his life of wheat--and he looked at the bag, as he deposited it carefully in the bottom of the canoe, with satisfaction not unmingled with honest pride, which was shared in by his wife and children, who came to the water’s edge to see him off.