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From time to time, while he listened, his eyes glanced out with contentment upon the possessions with which he was surrounded upon the rich-coloured stubble of his clearings stretching as far as eye could see down the Assumption, with their flocks, herds, and brush fences; upon the hamlet to which his enterprise had given birth, and where he could see, in one cottage, his sabotiers bent over their benches adding to their piles of wooden shoes; in others, women at the spinning wheel or loom, making the cloths of which he had improved the pattern, or weaving the fine and beautiful arrow-sashes, those ceintures fléchées of which the art is now lost, yet still known as snowshoers' rareties by the name of "L'Assomption sashes"; his makers of carved elm-bottom chairs and beef mocassins; and, within his courtyard, the large and well stocked granaries, fur-attics and stores for merchandise contained in his four great buildings.

The precipice is on one side of thee, the mountain and the wall of rock on the other. Thou drivest in against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to hold up thy horses. If it falls down the precipice, the pole drags thee down too. Thy ceintures are pulled away. They fall down. Thou shacklest the horse, because the pole is broken on the path of the defile.

When the violation of virgin chastity and conjugal fidelity became more frequent, fathers and husbands had recourse, even in Europe, to a mechanical contrivance for the purpose of preserving intact the honour of the family. This was a kind of padlock, which shut up all access to the seat of voluptuousness. The invention is attributed to one Francesco di Carrera, an imperial judge of Padua, who lived about the close of the 15th century. The machine itself was called the Girdle of Chastity. Francesco's acts of cruelty brought him to the scaffold, where he was strangled in 1405, by a decree of the Senate of Venice. One of the principal accusations brought against him was the employment of the Girdle of Chastity, for his mistresses, and it is said by Misson that a box filled with these articles was for a long time preserved in the palace of St. Mark, at Venice. Rabelais speaks of these girdles, which he calls Ceintures á la Bergamasque, "Nay," says he, Pantagruel, "may that Nick in the dark cellar, who hath no white in his eye, carry me quiet away with him, if, in that case, whenever I go abroad from the palace of my domestic residence, I do not, with as much circumspection as they use to ring mares in our country, to keep them from being saillied by stoned horses, clap a Bergamesco lock upon my wife." Brantome has the following notice of these chastity preservers. "Des temps du roi Henri il yeut un certain Quinquallier qui apporte une douzaine de certains engins

Thou drivest in against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to hold up thy horses. If it falls into the abyss, the pole drags thee down too. Thy ceintures are pulled away. They fall down. Thou shacklest the horse, because the pole is broken on the path of the narrow pass. Not knowing how to tie it up, thou understandest not how it is to be repaired.