the burning surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently
nerveless thumb.  The hands were noteworthy.  They were large-
knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the
nails blunt and broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises,
healed and healing, such as are common to the hands of hard-working
men.  On the back were huge, upstanding veins, eloquent of age and
toil.  Looking at them, it was hard to believe that they were the
hands of the woman who had once been the belle of Island McGill.
This last, of course, I learned later.  At the time I knew neither
her history nor her identity. 

She wore heavy man's brogans.  Her legs were stockingless, and I
had noticed when she walked that her bare feet were thrust into the
crinkly, iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at
every step.  Her figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a
rough man's shirt and in a ragged flannel petticoat that had once
been red.  But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weather-
beaten, surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of
greyish hair, that caught and held me.  Neither drifted hair nor
serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a forehead, high