river, she had a canopy of vines above her head, and between her upward glance and the sky, a blooming rose, faintly pink, and a bird's nest with four blue eggs. Captain Demeré, coming in at the gate of the stockade one afternoon, exclaimed in surprise and pleasure at the prettiness and the completeness of this rude comfort. There was but one room in the house with a floor; the seats were only puncheon benches with rough staves for legs thrust through auger-holes and one or two of her befrilled "tabourets"; the table was of like manufacture; the beds and pillows were mere sacks filled with dried balsam fringes from the great fir-trees, and supported on the rudest frames; but the fresh aromatic fragrance the fir dispensed, the snow-white linen the couches displayed, the flutter of the quaint bird-decorated curtains at the windows, the array of the few bits of treasured old china, the shelf of precious old books, the cluster of purple and white violets arranged in a great opaline pearly mussel-shell from the river, in default of vase, in the center of the wabbly table, the dainty freshness and neatness of the whole--"This is _home_!" he declared. "I accept a new anthropological dogma. Man is only the fort-builder--woman is the home-maker!" "Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is _home_!" "But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow. Nevertheless, this did not contribute to alter Captain Demeré's opinion that the frontier was no place for women, though that would imply, with his later conclusions, no place for home. He went away wearing in his buttonhole a sprig of sweetbrier, which he declared again reminded him so of home. He had not thought to find it here, and memory fell upon him unprepared and at a disadvantage. The moon was up when he stepped into his boat, and the orderly, bending to the oars, shot straight out into the river. Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface, and looking back Demeré could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the sloping bank the cleared space, where the moonbeams fell in unbroken splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel. Home undoubtedly! As the boat headed up the river he looked moodily at the ripples, glancing in the moonbeams, and noted with a keen new sensitiveness the fragrance of the eglantine, reminiscent of summers dead and gone, and life as fleeting and frail as the transitory flower. For the news that came in these days from over the mountains was always heavy news,--rumors of massacres, now of a single individual in some exposed and dangerous situation, and again of settlers surprised and overcome by numbers within the defenses of their own stanch stockade.