The San Francisco call., 1898-01-02

"
 was an island that had once been a
 long promontory, like a battlement
 jutting out hundreds of wards into
 the gulf. At one point it was pierced
 by an archway. Its sides were all
 most sheer; its top was flat and
 level. Upon the sides there was no verdure; upon the top centuries had made green field. The wild geese as they flew north, myriad fiocks of gulls, gannets and cormorants, and all man. ner Of fowl of the sea- had builded upon the top until it grew rich with grass and shrub. The nations of the air sent their legions here to bivouac. The discord O. a thousand languages might be heard far out to sea or far in upon the land. Mill lions of the feathered races swarmed there; sometimes the air above was darkened by clouds of them. No fog bell on rock-bound coast might warn mari ners more ominously than these battal- ions of adventurerS on the Perce Rock.
 No human being had ever mounted to this eyrie nor scaled the bulwarks of this feathered Eden. Three hundred feet below shipbuilders might toll and fisher men hover, but the lofty home of the marauders of the air had not yet suf- fered the invasion of man. It was the legend that this mighty palisade had once been a bridge of rock stretched across the gulf, builded by the gods of the land who smote with granite arms and drove back defeated the appalling gods of the sea.
 Generations of fishermen had looked upon the yellowish, reddish limestone of the Perce Rock with an adventuring eye but it would seem that not even the tiny, clinging hoof of a chamois or of a wild goat might find a foothold upon the straight sides of it. Three hundred feet was a. long way to climb hand over hand so for centuries the Perce Rock in the wide St. Lawrence Cuff remained soll- tary and unconquered.
 But there came a day when man. the spoiler, single-handed and alone, should assail it.
 This is the tale that is told of it: A hundred years ago, when England was fighting France, the French squadron fresh from destroying the fishing stations on the Islands of St. Pierre and Mique- lon, was lying off the coast of Gaspe near to this vast rock called Perce. Just beyond, in Nal Baie, was good shelter, but because of the fishing posts at Perce, where the commissariat could get fresh fish and food, Richery, the French ad- miral, chose to lie in the tideway be- fore Perce Rock. The master gunner of the admirals ship was.a Jerseyman, wLo being in St. Malo had been pressed into the service. In vain he protested. There was his Norman accent, his captors said: that was evidence enough, and if he was not citizen of France he should be, for French was his language. So he was carried off in the Inyincible, and with her sailed the seas looking for British ship to fight.
 His name was Antonio Robichon, and he had owned fishing brig called the Charming Nancy, which sailed year after year to this very port of Perce, bringing Jersey fishermen, and carrying away again the dried cod to Europe. When he was pressed into the French navy at St. Malo, his brother, who was first mate of the. Charming Nancy, took her on to Gaspe on his brothers business just the same as if the brother himself were sail ing her.
 Meanwhile Antonio was waiting in the tideway where he had come and gone Tor ten years. seeing on the shore the fishing posts of the great ConJuniper tea, and danced with the Masters daughters.
 As Antonio leaned on his great gun, looking out to the shore, the first day the squadron arrived off Perce, he won dered if the daughters were there now; whether Minois, the youngest-Minois the madcap, Minois, the hunter, who shot deer like a Mohican-was still there. It was now two years since he had seen this bay of Perce; she was seventeen then she was nineteen now-Minois Carnaval the Masters youngest daughter An toine had asked her for a kiss when he bade her good-by last, and she had laughed in his face: but he also remer9- bered that she had waved her red 'ker- chief from the roof of the fishing-post ag the Charming Nancy sailed away, and that she remained on the roof as long as the Charming Nancy could be seen.
 Was she still there? And if she was what would she think of him-a gunner now on a French ship. He might be or dered to lombard the very house where she lived, might indeed fire the shot which should kill heri Sine was French, but she was Canadian, and her country was now England. Two generations had nearly passed since Canada had been yielded up to the English, and in that time Jersey Normans more English than the English, had chiefly occupied the dis trict called Gaspe.
 Antoine studied the matter hard and the more he thought of it the harder to crack the nut seemed. His patriotism was not of that sort which smiles at martyrdom. He was of the easygoing kind who do things because they are ex- pected to do them, from whom habit