Mr. Killgrove, the damster, came forth and offered us the freedom of his settlement in a tobacco-box. Tobacco is hospitality in the compactest form. Civilization has determined that tobacco, especially in the shape of smoke, is essential as food, water, or air. The pipe is everywhere the pipe of peace. Peace, then, and anodyne-repose, after a day of travel, were offered us by the friendly damster.
A squad of lumbermen were our new fellow-citizens. These soldiers of the outermost outpost were in the regulation-uniform, — red-flannel shirts impurpled by wetting, big boots, and old felt-hats. Blood-red is the true soldierly color. All the residents of Damville dwelt in a great log-barrack, the Hôtel-de-Ville. Its architecture was of the early American style, and possessed the high art of simplicity. It was solid, not gingerbreadesque. Primeval American art has a rude dignity, far better than the sham splendors of our mediæval and transition period.
Our new friends, luxurious fellows, had been favored by Fate with a French-Canadian cook, himself a Three of Frères Provinciaux. Such was his reputation. We saw by the eye of him, and by his nose, formed for comprehending fragrances, and by the lines of refined taste converging from his whole face toward his mouth, that he was one to detect and sniff gastronomic possibilities in the humblest materials. Joseph Bourgogne looked the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him: eyes
