Edgar spouted like a pond-sized whale. “Now that’s all right now! Saxinars good people, and so was Neil’s father’s folks. I had good, solid antecedents, Republicans and Calvinist Presbyterians, almost without an exception, thank God!”

Julie snickered, “That’s what I said. Nice and stupid. But my own folks, they were French. The women all wore ribbons and the men all took ‘em off!”

Neil cajoled her, “Now Granny, I learned in the Army that the French aren’t a bit wicked, as their funny papers make out. They’re the carefullest farmers in Europe, and the tightest shopkeepers.”

“Maybe one kind of French are. But my ancestors were the light-footed breed that skipped off from Europe because it was too tame, and settled in Quebec, and skipped off from there, too, because it was too pious, and they drank high wines and wouldn’t have any truck with anybody that was tamer than the wolves and lynxes and Assiniboins.”

She looked inward on a red-lit girlhood, and mused aloud: “I was born in Wisconsin, too, in Hiawatha, and my, it was a tough lumbertown, then, and I danced with the raftsmen—I could dance awful light and they wore red caps.”

Edgar snorted, “Isn’t that kind of mixed-up?”

“Well, it was mixed up—more’n you’ll ever know, old man! Even then, when it was all tarpaper shanties and pine clearings, you Saxinars read your Sabbath Extracts for Little Christians. But my folks–-My father, Alexandre Payzold, he died when I was ten, and so did my mama, it was a small-pox epidemic.”

Neil was wondering how Vestal, Old Bay Colony out of Dorset, would accept this torch-glaring wilderness origin, as Julie clucked on, in tune to her knitting-needles:

“Yes, Alexandre Payzold. I don’t guess I recollect him very good, except he was a fine, big man, with a huge, enormous black beard—it tickled!—and he sang lots. He was a mail-runner and he worked some in the Big Woods and he drove the first coach—oh, he spoke English good, I remember that, but he’d yell at the horses in French. When him and Mama died, I was only ten, and I was raised by Mama’s brother, Uncle Emil Aubert. He was a fur-trader. He never told me much about Papa’s folks, the Payzolds.

“But I know my Papa’s papa, Louis Payzold, was a farmer and a trapper and he dug some copper on Lake Superior, and he married a girl named Sidonie Pic, and her father was Xavier Pic—let’s see—Xavier would be your great-great-great-grandfather.

“Uncle Emil knew a little about Xavier, because Xavier was a wonderful fellow that got around all over the frontier. I don’t suppose there’s anything about him in history—he never got rich, and of course they never kept many records or had any newspapers in the wilderness. From what I recall of what Uncle Emil told me—oh dear, it’s maybe seventy years ago now since I heard his stories!—Xavier was the best kind of French voyageur. Maybe there was some bad things about him, too, but I guess Uncle Emil wouldn’t tattle about them to a little girl like I.”