Fifteen years ago,--it was on the seventeenth of August, 1845,--I made my first pilgrimage to Lorette, in company with a friend. We wandered at large through the village, talking _patois_ to the swarthy damsels, and picking up Indian knick-knacks, as we went. At last, fired with the ambition of doing a distinguished thing, we proposed calling upon the head chief of the village, whose name, I think, was Simon, but might possibly have been Peter,--for I regret to say that my memory is rather misty upon that important point. That personage was absent from home; but we were hospitably received by his father, who also appeared to be his butler, as he was engaged in bottling off some root-beer into stone blacking-jars, when we entered. I suppose the chief's father must once have been a chief himself, and that his menial position arose from the fact of his appearance being rather disreputable. He was a decrepit and very dirty old man, in a tight blue frock-coat, and swathed as to his spindle shanks with scarlet leggings. Sitting by a small window at the farther end of the large, bare room, was the prettiest little Huronite damsel I ever saw, rather fair than dark, and very neatly attired in a costume partly Indian. This little girl--a granddaughter of the dirty old man, as that person informed us--was occupied in tying up some small bundles of what the Canadians call _racine_--a sweet-smelling kind of rush-grass, sold by them in the Quebec market, and used like _sachets_, for imparting a pleasant odor to linen garments. After some conversation of a general character, the old man requested us to write our names in his visitors' book, which was a long, dirty volume, similar in form to those usually seen upon bar-counters. In this book we were delighted to find the autographs of many dear friends, of whom we little expected to meet with traces in this nook of the North. Mark Tapley and Oliver Twist, for instance, had visited the place in company some two years before. There could be no mistake about it; for there were the two names, in characteristic, but different manuscript, bound together by the mystic circumflex that indicated them to be friends and travelling-companions. The record covered a period of ten years; but was that sufficient to account for the appearance of Shakspeare on its pages? And yet there he was; and in merry mood he must have been, when he came to Lorette,--for he wrote himself down "Bill," and dashed off a little picture of himself after the signature, in a bold, if not artistic manner. Our friend Titmouse was there, too, represented by his famous declaration commencing, "Tittlebat Titmouse is my name." He seemed to have taken particularly fast hold of the memory of the old Huron, who described him as a tremendous-looking, big person, with large black whiskers, and remembered having enjoyed a long pull at a brandy-flask carried by him. Of course there can be no doubt about that man being the real Tittlebat of our affections.