“And one whom I can bless as my joint heir with you, my Jacques,” said the young commandant, turning a pleasant face over his subaltern. “Ultimately you will be my heirs, when Renée is done with St. Bernard and the other islands of the seigniory. Therefore--yes--I want a very good girl indeed, from Rouen, to perpetuate a line of my father’s peasantry on Adam Dollard’s estate in New France.” “Yes, m’sieur,” responded Jacques dejectedly as he plodded upward. It grieved him that a light leg and a high bright face like Dollard’s were sworn to certain destruction. His pride in the house of Des Ormeaux was great, but his love for the last male of its line was greater. This Adam Daulac, popularly called Dollard, was too mighty a spirit for him to wrestle with; so all his dissent was silent. When he recalled the cavalier’s gay beginning in France, he could not join it to the serious purpose of the same man in New France. Jacques climbed with his face towards the ground, but Dollard gazed over the St. Lawrence’s upper flood where misty headlands were touched with spring grayness. The river, like an elongated sea, wound out of distances. There had been an early thaw that year, and no drowned fragments of ice toppled about in the current. So vast a reach of sight was like the beginning of one of St. John’s visions. II. LAVAL. THE convent of the Ursulines had received and infolded the lambs sent out by Louis XIV. to help stock his wilderness. This convent, though substantially built of stone, was too small for all the purposes of the importation, and a larger structure, not far from it, had been prepared as a bazar in which to sort and arrange the ship-load. The good nuns, while they waited on their crowd of miscellaneous guests, took no notice of that profane building; and only their superior, Mother Mary of the Incarnation, accompanied and marshaled future brides to the marriage market. Squads began to cross the court soon after matins. The girls were rested by one night’s sleep upon land, the balsam odor of pines, and the clear air on Quebec heights. They must begin taking husbands at once. The spring sowing was near. Time and the chemistry of nature wait on no woman’s caprices. And in general there was little coyness among these girls. They had come to New France to settle themselves, and naturally wished to make a good bargain of it. Some faces wore the stamp of vice, but these were the exceptions. A stolid herd of peasantry, varying in shape and complexion but little, were there to mother posterity in Canada. Some delicate outlines and auburn tresses offset the monotony of somber black eyes and stout waists. Clucking all the way across the court her gentle instructions and repressions, Mother Mary led squad after squad.