52 DANVIS FARM LIFE 



from his Canadian home, as yet un-Yankeefied 

 and unspoiled; garrulous with his droll French- 

 English; as ready as another to laugh at his own 

 mistakes; picturesque in his peaked woolen cap 

 and coarse, oddly fashioned dress of homespun 

 gray with red-sashed waist and moccasined feet. 



A skillful wielder of the axe is he, and, though a 

 passably loyal subject of a queen, with no whit of 

 reverence for these ancient monarchs of the forest 

 which he hews down relentlessly, regardless of 

 their groans as they topple to their fall. He has 

 brought an acre or more of the woods' white floor 

 face to face with the steel-blue winter sky, and all 

 over the little waste are piled in cords and half- 

 cords the bodies of the slain kings, about whose 

 vacant mossed and lichened thrones are heaped 

 their crowns in ignominious piles. He has a fire, 

 more for company than for warmth, whereat he 

 often lights his short, blackened clay pipe and sits 

 by while he eats his half -frozen dinner and while 

 the smoke fills the woods about with a blue haze 

 and a pungent fragrance. 



Here, now, comes the farmer, mounted on his 

 stout sled with its long wood-rack, driving his 

 steaming horses which he blankets while he makes 

 his load. He exchanges with the chopper badly 

 fashioned sentences of very bad French for rat- 

 tling volleys of no better English, upbraiding him, 

 perhaps, for piling his wood with bark down, or 



