No wonder that yonder country woman is selling her milk by the lump out of a sack, or that her husband, who is a bit of a humourist, has stuck up on their legs his half dozen dead pigs to glare at the passers-by as though they were still alive. There are half a score of Red Indians too; their tribe has pitched its wigwams in the forest at a little distance from the town, and they have come in to loaf about and pick up anything they can, or in the hope of getting some good-natured Canadian to treat them to the deadly fire-water. There they stand looking stolidly at the house of Pierre Lebon the baker, which is in a pretty plight, to be sure. It is a corner house, and round that unlucky corner the snow has whirled and eddied all night long till it has formed a pyramid-shaped hill twenty feet high against the side of the building, utterly burying the doorway, and even covering one of the upper windows, which it at last forced in. All along the little street beyond, for a score of yards at least, there is a bare patch of pavement on which the giddy blasts have not allowed a single flake of snow to settle.
Besides these Indians, there is a girl of the same tribe on the market-place, come to dispose of her little store of bark work embroidered with porcupine-quills, and gaily ornamented moccasins. She too is picturesque enough with her dark handsome face, surmounted by a quaint cap of white feathers, and her large cloak of white fox skins, beneath which peep out her scarlet leggings, and a pair of moccasins, not smartly decorated like those she has for sale, but made of plain buff leather, better suited to the great flat snow-shoes by her side, with which she has made her way hither across the deep snow. She speaks but little, yet her keen and watchful glances show that she is by no means unobservant of what is going on around her. See! one of the market women has stopped just in front of her, but it is only to have a good look at the glossy wrapper, white as snow, which glistens quite dazzlingly in the bright sunlight.
"Ah, child," says the woman, good-humouredly, as the girl rises and stands upright before her, "no one is likely to take you for the 'Black Lady of Sorel.'"