"I suppose we surprised you this evening," said he, laughing, and throwing one leg over a vacant soap box, just as any of the natives would have done, "but our being here surprises ourselves as much as it does you. We come from the McGill College in Montreal, and we are going far into the depths of your forest here to look for a few week's sport." The group of listeners appeared a little more reconciled to the intrusion by this explanation of it, and after a few moments of awkward silence, old Joe Bentley, who was near the speaker, said: "Welcome, gentlemen! Ye're welcome to the village, and good sport ye can promise yerselves if ye'll go the right way about it." "Then we must hope," put in a second of the students, "that some of you who know will not be above giving us a word of advice." "The Lord forbid," ejaculated old Bentley in a most serious tone. "And the very best spot in the country is the spot we were talkin' of as ye came along. It's out by the 'Sleepy Cottage.' If ye can get that strange Frenchman to leave you through his grounds, ye never had such shooton' an' fishin as there is a couple of miles up on the other side of them." "Who is the strange Frenchman?" asked the first speaker, as he felt in his vest pocket for a match to light his cigar. "He'm. Give us an easier one than that to answer," said Martin Doyle, a crude, suspecting farmer, who smoked sullenly on the end of a bench. "How is dacent people, who lived here all their lives, to know who them invaders is that comes in on people with their quare notions and ways, never showing the daylight to the child God gave 'em till she's a fine young woman on their hands, and never spakin' a word to other folk, as if honest men wasn't their betters any day." The new-comers smiled from one to another. It is so consistent with the character of these country people to guard against and suspect, rather than trust unknown people who come among them wrapped in a mystery of any sort. "This is strange," said another student in a tone calculated to elicit all the information about the "invader," that the rustics were willing to give.