prescription, which she declined to give.

Thus it was that the French Canadian mothers with daughters of their own,
bright-eyed brunettes, ready for the man-market, regarded with toleration
the girl who took their children away for picnics down the river or into
the woods, and brought them back safe and sound at the end of the day.
Not that they failed to be shocked sometimes, when, on her wild Indian
pony, Fleda swept through Manitou like a wind and out into the prairie,
riding, as it were, to the end of the world. Try as they would, these
grateful mothers of Manitou, they could not get as near to Fleda Druse as
their children did, and they were vast distances from her father.

"There, there, look at him," said old Madame Thibadeau to her neighbour
Christine Brisson--"look at him with his great grey-beard, and his eyes
like black fires, and that head of hair like a bundle of burnt flax! He
comes from the place no man ever saw, that's sure."

"Ah, surelee, men don't grow so tall in any Christian country," announced
Christine Brisson, her head nodding sagely. "I've seen the pictures in
the books, and there's nobody so tall and that looks like him--not
anywhere since Adam."

"Nom de pipe, sometimes-trulee, sometimes, I look up there at where he
lives, and I think I see a thousand men on horses ride out of the woods
behind his house and down here to gobble us all up. That's the way I
feel. It's fancy, but I can't help that." Dame Thibadeau rested her
hands--on her huge stomach as though the idea had its origin there.

"I've seen a lot of fancies come to pass," gloomily returned her friend.
"It's a funny world. I don't know what to make of its sometimes."