"Come, comrade, the tide has turned!" Whereupon she sat up quietly, as if this were for her the most usual of awakenings, and began to arrange her hair. I went out upon the shadowy marsh and soon accomplished a second theft of new milk, driving the tranquil cow which furnished it into the corner behind the stacks, that our dairy might be the more conveniently at hand. Our fast broken (and though I hinted nought of it to Mizpah, I found black bread growing monotonous), I carried the canoe down to the edge of the tide. But Mistress Mizpah's daintiness revolted at the mud, whereupon she took off her moccasins and stockings before she came to it, and I caught a gleam of slim white feet at the dewy edge of the grass. When I had carried down the paddles, pole, and baggage, I found her standing in a quandary. She could not get into the canoe with that sticky clay clinging to her feet, and there was no place where she could sit down to wash them. Carelessly enough (though my heart the while trembled within me), I stretched out my hand to her, saying:-- "Lean on me, comrade, and then you can manage it all right." And so it was that she managed it; and so indifferently did I cast my eyes about, now at the breaking dawn, now at the swelling tide, that I am sure she must have deemed that I saw not or cared not at all how white and slender and shapely were her feet! In few minutes we were afloat, going swiftly on the tide. The sky was all saffron as we slipped through the settlement, and a fairy glow lay upon the white cottages. The banks on either hand took on the ineffable hues of polished nacre. To the door of one cottage, close by the water, came a man yawning, and hailed us. But I flung back a mere "_Bon jour_," and sped on. Not till the settlement was out of sight behind us, not till the cross on the spire of the village was quite cut off from view, did I drop to the even pace of our day-long journeying. When at length we got beyond the influence of the tide, des Saumons was a shallow, sparkling, singing stream, its bed aglow with ruddy-coloured rocks. Here I laid aside my paddle and thrust the canoe onwards by means of my long pole of white spruce, while Mizpah had nought to do but lean back and watch the shores creep by. At the head of tide we had stopped to drink and to breathe a little. And there, seeing an old man working in front of a solitary cabin, I had deemed it safe to approach him and purchase a few eggs. After this we kept on till an hour past noon, when I stopped in a bend of the river, at the foot of a perpendicular cliff of red rock some seventy or eighty feet in height. Here was a thicket wherein we might hide both the canoe and ourselves if necessary. The canoe I hid at once, that--being a matter of the more time. Then we both set ourselves to gathering dry sticks, for it seemed to me we might here risk the luxury of a fire, with a dinner of roasted eggs.