“Ephrem.  Surprenant said no more than the truth.  Your mother was a good woman, Maria; you will not find her like.”

Maria’s head answered him “Yes,” but her lips were pressed close.

“Full of courage and good counsel, that she has been throughout her life; but it was chiefly in the early days after we were married, and then again when Esdras and yourself were little, that she showed herself the woman she was.  The wife of a small farmer looks for no easy life, but women who take to their work as well and as cheerfully as she did in those days, Maria, are hard to find.”

Maria faltered:—­“I know, father; I know it well;” and she dried her eyes for her heart was melting into tears.

“When we took up our first land at Normandin we had two cows and very little pasture for them, as nearly all our lot was in standing timber and hard to win for the plough.  As for me, I picked up my ax and I said to her:—­’Laura, I am going to clear land for you.’  And from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop, without ever coming back to the house except for dinner; and all that time she did the work of the house and the cooking, she looked after the cattle, mended the fences, cleaned the cow-shed, never rested from her toiling; and then half-a-dozen times a day she would come outside the door and stand for a minute looking at me, over there by the fringe of the woods, where I was putting my back into felling the birches and the spruce to make a patch of soil for her.

“Then in the month of July our well must needs dry up; the cows had not a drop of water to slake their thirst and they almost stopped giving milk.  So when I was hard at it in the woods the mother went off to the river with a pail in either hand, and climbed the steep bluff eight or ten times together with these brimming, and her feet that slipped back in the running sand, till she had filled a barrel; and when the barrel was full she got it on a wheelbarrow, and wheeled it off herself to empty it into the big tub in the cow-pasture more than three hundred yards from the house, just below the rocks.  It was not a woman’s work, and I told her often enough to leave it to me, but she always spoke up briskly:—­’Don’t you think about that—­don’t think about anything—­clear a farm for me.’  And she would laugh to cheer me up, but I saw well enough this was too much for her, and that she was all dark under the eyes with the labour of it.

“Well, I caught up my ax and was off to the woods; and I laid into the birches so lustily that chips flew as thick as your wrist, all the time saying to myself that the wife I had was like no other, and that if the good God only kept me in health I would make her the best farm in the countryside.”

The rain was ever sounding on the roof now and then a gust drove against the window great drops which ran down the panes like slow-falling tears.  Yet a few hours of rain and the soil would be bare, streams would dance down every slope; a few more days and they would hear the thundering of the falls.