As I lit my pipe after this
satisfactory arrangement, the roar of the mighty Montmorency, whirling
down its turbulent perpendicular flood behind a half-drawn curtain of
green and azure ice, sounded like exquisite music to my ears, and I looked
towards Quebec and blinked at its fire-flashing tin spires and house-tops
burning through the coppery morning fog, until my mind's eye became
telescopic, and my thoughts, unsentimental though I be, reverted to
civilized society and its _agrements_, and particularly to a certain
steep-roofed cottage situated on a suburban road, in the boudoirs of which
I liked to imagine one pined for my return. If memory has its pleasures,
has it not also its glimpses of regret?--and who can say that the former
compensate for the latter? Even now I see her as she used to step out on
the veranda,--the lithe Indian girl, rivalling the choicest "desert-
flower" of Arabia in the rich darkness of her eyes and hair, and in the
warm mantling of her golden-ripe complexion,--unutterably graceful in the
thorough-bred ease of her elastic movements,--Zosime MacGillivray, perfect
type and model of the style and beauty of the _brulee_. She was the only
child of a retired trader of the old North-West Fur Company and his Indian
wife; had been partly educated in England; possessed rather more than the
then average Colonial allowance of accomplishments; and was, altogether,
so much in harmony with my roving forest-inclinations, that I sometimes
thought, half seriously, how pleasant and respectable it would be to have
one such at the head of one's camp-equipage, and how much nicer a
companion she would be on a hunt than that disreputable old scoundrel,
Zach Hiver.
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