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The old Livingston mansion was at that time standing, much nearer to the entrance-gates than the more modern residence inhabited by the owner's family; and the quaint well, with the stone curb, the water of which was so remarkable for its purity that travellers came from a distance to ask the privilege of drinking, formed an object of interest at least, if not of actual beauty, before the old vine-grown porch.
Very few English tourists think it worth their while to spend any time at Culoz, pretty little place although it be; and the landlady of the quaint auberge, with its wooden, vine-grown piazza, was somewhat amazed and distracted by the appearance of foreign visitors. The dining-room seemed to be full of peasants in blue blouses, who had been attending a fair; but lunch was served to Mr. and Mrs.
Melancholy reminders of this splendor exist even now in the shape of a crumbled ruin here and there, a lichened pillar, an occasional porcelain urn in its place atop a vine-grown bit of wall.
And once more, forward; past white frame houses with porches, and vine-grown verandas, and well-tended gardens, and groves of oak and beech and hickory trees "John Barleycorn" makes an ineffectual but gallant struggle to get in at the large white gate of one of these comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on.
She was slightly impatient of its contented smallness, of her satisfaction with such things as her sewing, her cake making, her childish conferences with girl friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present.
To-day it is he, the missionary famous in the north land, who passing back and forward between his lonely mission in the Athabasca and the headquarters of his order, comes to us and occupies the guest-chamber in our little, old-fashioned, vine-grown cottage. The retaking of Fort Douglas virtually closed the bitter war between Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Westers.
And their long kiss, there in sight of their new home-to-be alone there in that desolated world was as natural as the summer breeze, the liquid melody of the red-breast on the blossomy apple-bough above their heads, the white and purple spikes of odorous lilacs along the vine-grown stone wall, the gold and purple dawn now breaking over the distant reaches of the river.
There was no sign of human passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.
A small linen sheet served as shroud, a clean, flower-lined soap box formed that baby's coffin, and Greorge and I were the grave diggers and chief mourners, who laid the tiny body at rest in the little vine-grown churchyard. War willed it thus. When I got back from the cemetery I found another load of refugees installed in the courtyard.
It is not a hut, and neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast, barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact.
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