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Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection
Murray, W. H. H. (William Henry Harrison), 1840-1904
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Tff ■■^JB J. 11Ty^y^Tl ^^y^^T^-- - I»n 5 rr rr y^mVfr --nY">J.»i l»»»'■ ■ ■ i-j iTiTi.. I-»« ■ ■ • ' • * n ■ t r ■ * ■ • • • • ** *.. . j -_ ■_ i»ff' ViM^KjAx*..*.* *•*••• *._t>>1 ....t**t ......'••••••<?.....»..ir....»^-...a^V;,*//■«**■•**+*»»»• *1* USSMs^ffis DAYLIGHT LAND Bt W. H. H. MURRAY DAYLIGHT LAND The Experiences, Incidents, and Adventures, Humorous and Otherwise, which befel Judge John Doe, Tourist, of San Francisco ; Mr. Cephas Pepperell, Capitalist, of Boston; Colonel Goffe, the Man from New Hampshire, and divers others, in their Parlor-Car Excursion over Prairie and Mountain ALL OF WHICH I SAW, AND ONE OF WHOM I WAS As recorded and set forth by W. H. H. MURRAY ILLUSTRATED WITH ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY DESIGNS IN COLORS UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF J. B. MILLET BOSTON CUPPLES AND HURD M DCCC LXXXVIIT ™» To GEORGE STEWART, Jr., D. C. L., D. Litt., F. R. G. S. OF QUEBEC WHO HAPPILY REPRESENTS THE BEST THAT THERE IS IN CANADIAN CULTURE AND CHARACTER I DEDICATE IN EVIDENCE OF MY ESTEEM AND ADMIRATION THIS VOLUME THE AUTHOR CONTENTS. Chap. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VIL VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. j introduction The Meeting .... At Breakfast ..... A Very Hopeful Man . The Big Nepigon Trout . The Man in the Velveteen Jacket The Capitalist A Jollt Camp at Rush Lake Big Game A Strange Midnight Ride . Banff Page 17 Nameless Mountains . Sabbath among the Mountains 23 29 42 . 53 68 . 95 121 . 139 167 . 183 211 224 10 CONTENTS. Chap. Page XIII. The Great Glacier 258 XIV. The Hermit of Fraser Canon . . . . 274 XV. Fish and Fishing in British Columbia . . . 298 XVI. Vancouver 307 XVII. The Parting at Victoria ...... 326 IIWailMWPIUjjrfii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FROM DESIGNS BT J. D. WOODWARD, J. C. DURAND, C. BROUGHTON, C. COPELAND, J. CARTER BEARD, C. H. JOHNSON, AND OTHERS. Our of the white blankness started letters red as blood .... Vermilion Lakes .... The Judge .... The Three Sisters, Canmore " A scholarly looking man " A Voice from the Doorway "i go as a pilgrim " "Thou shalt write us" The Bow River, near Calgary Initial Letter .... "Our hands met like a flash" On the Road to the Glacier I How fresh the ladies look " Jackfish Crossing, Lake Superior Initial Letter .... Frontispiece 9 . 10 11 . 15 17 . 18 21 . 23 23 . 24 25 . 28 29 . 29 12 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. | Count the clicks "... The Waiter ..... The First Bridge .... The Rope Bridge .... Caribou Road Bridge, Fraser River A Real Gem ..... Red Rock and Nepigon Bay Thunder Cape, Lake Superior Initial Letter .... Crowfoot Encampment The Judge glared " Dynamite is n't so bad, after all " Griffin Lake, Eagle Pass . Initial Letter ..... Civilization means luxury . Fraser Canon, above Spuzzum I Jerusalem ! He 's a twenty-pounder On the Columbia River . Salmon Cache Initial Letter .... Mt. Carroll, from the West The Hackman .... The Runaway Colt "The dog and cat met" . A Miner's Hut Mt. Mack ay, near Port Arthur Initial Letter II am delighted to greet you : "Busted, completely busted" Black Canon .... I He followed me " Goats' Heads .... I On a cliff, stood Percussion ': Goats' Heads .... The Path of the Avalanche The Man of Science A Trial of Strength . 30 39 41 42 42 45 48 52 53 53 54 57 63 67 68 68 71 79 87 91 94 95 95 97 102 103 105 106 107 109 111 115 116 n LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 13 " He struck the man of science ' Near Revelstoke Initial Letter .... Jack Osgood Primitive Transportation Indian Girl . . . ... The Man from New Hampshire Kananaskis Falls .... The Mountain Lion Initial Letter Gray Wolf White Tail Deer . Buffalo White Fox Musk Ox . . . Prong Horn Antelope . Caribou Rocky Mountain Goat . Rocky Mountain Sheep The Grizzly Bear Moose Sea Otter ...... Bow River and Cascade Mountains, near Initial Letter ..... In the Selkirks ..... Kicking Horse Pass .... Sapomaxicow, Chief of Blackfeet . Falls of the Bow, Banff Initial Letter ..... The Bow River, Banff Mt. Stephen, and Glacier, and Cathedrai Fraser Canon, below North Bend Vermilion Lakes On the Tote Road Van Horne Range . Initial Letter .... Albert Canon .... Banff Mountain 120 121 121 123 125 131 135 138 139 139 140 141 144 146 148 149 152 154 157 161 163 166 167 167 169 176 179 183 183 187 191 197 208 209 211 211 215 14 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Cathedral Peak . Mt. Field Ruby Creek Hermit Range Initial Letter "There comes our clergyman Ross Peak .... A Mountain Picnic . East Ottertail The Chancellor Great Glacier from the Snow Sheds Initial Letter . Climbing the Great Glacier The Great Glacier . Mt. Hermit, Rogers Pass Sir Donald Mt. Stephen, from the East Kicking Horse Lake, Hector Lntitial Letter Caribou Wagon Road, Fraser Canon Eagle Peak .... Symbols and Figures " On the rock was a letter • C Indian Burying Ground . Bow River .... Chinook Indians Initial Letter Hope Peaks .... Castellated Cliffs, Ashcroft Salmon Drying .... Drying Candle Fish Kamloops Lake Initial Letter Tossing for Corner Lots . Panoramic view from Vancouver Cedar Tree, Vancouver Park Spruce Tree, Vancouver Park . 312, LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 15 The Ball 323 Indian Chief's Grave 325 Pitt River 326 Initial Letter 326 Siwash Canoes 327 Ajst Old Squaw 330 Medicine Man . 330 Indian Hermit 331 Squaw of the Medicine Man 331 At New Westminster 332 Flathead Indians 334 The Parting 335 At the Station 338 A mmm u INTRODUCTION. 1 Sp eed the going guest. | Whither art thou going, 0 wanderer, this summer ? " said a pleasant voice from the doorway, as I came up the gravel walk. | Are you going to the North and the home of ice, or to the East and the gates of the morning ? Or do you long for the odor of tropical flowers and the flash of colored wings ? Or shall you voyage to the West, that land of old-time fable, in which the blessed hved ? Tell me, thou ranger of woods, with thy whitened head and the heart of a boy, whither goest thou this summer ? " 11 am going, fair princess," I said, imitating the lightness of her phrasing, — "I am going to the West, to that heaven of the old-time folk, where the colors on the clouds are as golden as thy hair, and the sky as blue as thine eyes. I am going to the West, fair princess, where the plains are of emerald, the mountains snow-crowned, and the streams flow yellow with gold." 18 INTRODUCTION. "How goest thou, O wanderer?" continued the voice banteringly from the doorway. " Has Phoebus loaned you his car'Und taught you the government of his steeds ? Beware ! Eemember the fate of Phaeton ! Or has the sea sent you word that the Dolphins are waiting, all harnessed to the | bowl of the pink pearl shell ? Or do you go like a true pil- | grim, with sandalled foot and scalloped shoon ? Is it by the poetry or prose of power that you are to be drawn ? " I By both," I responded. \ "The fate of Phaeton has f' warned me, and the pearly | shell car of the Dolphins is small. I go as a pilgrim, but a pilgrim favored by the gods. I have sandals, and I shall walk when I choose. I have wings, — wings like an eagle's, and I shall fly where I will. And whether I fly or walk, I shall go with eyes open." "' I!' You surely go not alone !" Ay, alone," I responded, al one with my thoughts and my fancies, an endless train of companions." " But surely thou shouldst take one friend at least for the night, one comrade for the trail? " " Sweet spirit," I rejoined, " the cheerful face, the courteous tongue, the open hand, the honest heart, find INTRODUCTION. 19 friends where'er they go. All camp-fires shine for such, all doors fly open at their coming. The listening ear finds voice of knowledge, and for the seeing- eye God paints his pictures everywhere. He who takes humor with him has princely entertainment with a crust, and mirthfulness laughs the long road short. The young need company beyond themselves, but with the whitened head come thoughts which make companionship." " 0 wise philosopher ! " exclaimed the voice more soberly, " hast thou a charm against danger and an amulet for ill ? Dost thou not fear to leave the loved behind?" r'He who loves takes all his loved ones with him where'er he goes^/I answered. " Even their cares and wants abide with him, and the air which is forever round him on all sides is as a polished mirror to reflect their faces. Love owns imagination, and in it as a constant sky she sees forever all her stars fast fixed." " If we may not go with thee, dear one," she answered, 1 then our conspiracy must be uncovered. Each year thou leavest us — it is thy habit, and for weeks we have mistrusted thee. Hence we have counselled — we of thy hearth and heart — and plotted lovingly, and I am spokeswoman of the plot. We have decided we will not let you go unless you give us solemn promise." " Promise ? I will promise anything — on such an altar swear at random. Bring out the household. You are all rogues alike, for they come quickly at your signal, — too quickly to be honest. Now see I such m 20 INTRODUCTION. a kingdom. Who sweet tyrannies as never blessed could resist ? I promise to obey." [She reads.] " We of thy house do hereby agree to let thee go a-journeying again, and grant thee liberty to be gone for many weeks or months, as seemeth to thee good, — provided, that of all lovely sights, of all beautiful things and places that thou seest, of all strange people and uncouth objects, of all happy days and farcical conceits, along with all humorous incidents and mirthful experiences, thou shalt write us a full and faithful account. And if in journeying thou meetest with clever folk, with men and women gifted with mother-wit to make thee laugh, what they say shall be writ down for us, that we who bide here while thou farest on may not be lonely, but share with thee the profit and entertainment thou dost meet with. So shall this journey of thine be a happy one in truth, to all of us, and all the days be winged until we meet again. Dost thou promise ? " I Ay, ay," I answered briskly. | The yoke that Love lays on us is easy and the burden light. My pen shall keep pace with my feet. For your delight I will be tourist and scribbler both. You shall see what I see, — rivers and plains, mountains and snowy peaks, sunrises and sunsets, with all their glow, and starry nights, the works of men, and the nobler works of God. And what I hear to stir my mirth I will send you fairly written out; so shall your laughter be as echo to my own. And now the stirrup-cup. I drain it to safe-keeping of the house. We'll have sweet meeting after many days." 'THOU SHALT WRITE US. 1*^ DAYLIGHT LAND. CHAPTER I. THE MEETING. Welcome, old friend! A hundred thousand welcomes. HOU art the man!" cried a voice behind me, as I stepped out of the bathroom, prepared for the pleasures of the day as only a man can be by a bath, — 1 thou art the man, or my eyes are blind, or the man that trailed that dreadful trail of the Staked Plains with me has a double." " Judge Doe ! " I cried, and our hands met like a flash. " Not a man on the earth would I sooner see at this minute than yourself. This magnificent room "— and I glanced at the elegant car — 1 is not much hke the spot where we made our first meeting." And I thought of that barren waste of sand where I ran across him, without guide or water, as he wandered half blinded -_ phed. "For ~^r if you had not had it when you did you would probably have been wandering, a madman over the sands in half an hour. But a fig to the Staked Plains and the old memories ! We are here in this car, with plenty to eat and drink; and so tell me, where are you going " I am going home to the Golden Gate," he replied, " and I have come clean up from Washington to take this route. I wanted to escape the dust and the heat THE MEETING. 25 m of more southern ones, the alkali plains, and the hot looking ochred canons and the Buttes,. which are all right in winter,, but which in midsummer make me feel, as the train rolls down into them, as were being pushed into mouth of an oven. A friend told me in Washin that I could reach San cisco this way without the e%.-e;^- l-: \W 26 DAYLIGHT LAND. alkali dust, the infernal heat, and the glaring red colors, ride four hundred miles between glaciers, and see such scenery as I never saw on the Continent, and so I am here. But where are you going, old comrade of hot Texan trails and arid Arizona? Are you, too, bound for the Blessed Isles lying under the sunset ? " "Ay, ay," I returned laughingly, and in the same Hght strain that the Judge had taken. " I too am going to the West; not the West of classic fable, but of modern fact. I go, not to reach home, nor escape dust and heat, but to see the great mountains between the prairies and the sea. I met John Carrol at Parker's, in Boston, last week, — you remember Carrol, the man we met among the Nevadas that summer ? — and he told me that the Canadian scenery was beyond ^description ; that I could ride three hundred miles along glacial streams, with the glaciers from which they flow in full sight, with hundreds of mountains, that have not even been named, rising ten thousand feet above the level of the track; and knowing him to be care- ful of statement, I packed my valise, and here I _ jj am. " Here I am, too, for about the same reason," said a quiet voice behind me, and a hand stole slyly into mine; and looking around, there was Colonel Goffe, or, as we facetiously called him during the journey, I the Man from New Hampshire." " You see," he continued, after I had presented him to the Judge, " I own a ranch somewhere among the foot-hills beyond Calgary, and my oldest boy is making his start in Hfe on it. He has been out there two years, THE MEETING. 27 and I thought I would run over and see how he is getting along. He is to meet me at some station near the ranch, and is to go through with me to the coast, for he wrote that he did not wish me to see even the ranch until I had Seen the mountains, the glaciers, and the great forests." How defightful, often, are the surprises of travel! To think that, coming from different parts of the world, after years of wandering, without knowledge of each other's movements or purposes, we two, who had parted years before in Arizona, should meet face to face in this palace car, travelling for almost the same purpose, and with the same object in view, and that we old trailers, who had so often bivouacked together, and shared the same blanket, should have slept all night within a few feet of each other, not knowing ! Are the meetings of Hfe accidental, or is there a Power above us which arranges and compels the meetings and partings of our Hves ? "This is going to be a ha,ppy journey," said the Judge pleasantly, as he looked at the passengers grouped here and there. " I can see it in their faces. Bless me, how fresh the ladies look! There is not a tired face in the car." Dear old happy-hearted Judge ! I wonder if the prophecies of men are not born of their moods, after all ? For with all thy nice taste and dehcate sense of the fit and the needful, never did I meet a Hghter heart or a happier disposition than thine. But indeed it was a rare company, for it was whoUy composed of intelHgent and refined people, accustomed 28 DAYLIGHT LAND. to travel, and travel-wise. And best of all, we were filled with curiosity and some of us with incredulity touching the wonders it had been foretold us we should see, — such marvels and majesties of nature as in truth make the ride from Calgary to Vancouver Hke a journey through fairy and giant land. Thus, with old friends unexpectedly met; with a throng of bright and courteous people around us, and feeHng that we were a " goodly companie going to seek goodly things," our happy journey, as the dear old Judge had prophetically caUed it, began. \-%m Sf^jSW & ^.^1 =5t= LS B.fejg SlgliS^ m ^m m jw?,*"- CHAPTER H. AT BREAKFAST. A feast of reason and a flow of soul. AKE another cup of this dehcious coffee, Judge," I said to my companion at the table. We are travelling Hke the gods, and it is fit that we should fare Hke the gods. " Your conceit is a happy one," rephed the Judge, as he inspected his cream. " This is the true nectar of Olympus, if it was drawn from the udder of a cow. The ancients hit it exactly. Their heaven was only the sublimating of the earth. Their gods goddesses were their best-looking women, their crowned athletes, and their Parnassus nothing but an idealized summit of a hill in Attica. We moderns separate our heaven from the earth, and so lose the beautiful sequence of the divine plan. If in the place of theologians we had the old sages again, our children would be taught the sweet lesson that the heavenly is only the earthly in bloom, and that angels are but men and women who have been educated a Httle higher up than the schooling of this life carries them." I And you might add," I suggested, " that this manner of travel which we are now enjoying is only a modern method of flying." " Certainly," said the Judge, as he buttered his roU, " we are flying. Count the clicks," — and he held up his watch, — " forty in twenty seconds ; that gives us the number of miles to the hour. Forty miles an hour and at breakfast! Could an angel keep her stroke with a cup of coffee in her hand? See! the Hquid does n't sway in the cup. I wonder if the navvies that made this road-bed appreciated their work ? " " The passengers do, if they did n't," I responded, " and that is the important thing, perhaps. The bee may not know the sweetness of its own honey nor the mathematical perfection of its ceH. But the man gifted with the dehcacy of taste and the artistic sense appreciates both. The lower order does the work and the AT BREAKFAST. 31 higher one gives the applause. That seems to be the way of it." At this moment we went roaring over a bridge whose mighty span stretched in majesty a hundred feet above the mad water that poured whirhng downward below us. We glanced from the window as the rumbling gave us its signal, and our mind received this photographic impression : A mountain to the right, mounded Hke a loaf, and wooded perfectly from base to dome; to the left a precipice, lifting sheer half a thousand feet from the dark pool lying sullen and black in its shadow; through this gorge and beyond, in the distance, a space of sky shone.Hke a mirror, and under us, the white angry water, — a picture flashed on us in a second and indelibly impressed on the memory ; a picture which I keep to this day, and shaU keep till the gallery in which it hangs, with a thousand other perfect ones, crumbles to the foundations. " The history of bridges is the history of civilization," remarked the Judge. " Waiter, this steak is a trifle underdone. Tell the cook to give it a brief turn on the iron. The cooking is excellent on this Hne," he remarked, evidently forgetting what he was going to 32 DAYLIGHT LAND. say about bridges, " but it is not up to the level of the Hoffman or of Young's; not quite up," he continued, as if he would, with fine judicial sense, discriminate to a nicety between degrees of excellence in a matter of such supreme importance. " One would not expect, Judge," I remarked, " to find so old a traveller as yourself so particular touching the cooking of a fillet." " There is where you mistake," responded the Judge. " He who travels should be an epicure, for his taste must be cosmopoHtan. He becomes acquainted with the fruits and vegetables of every zone, the fish of all seas, and the meats of every country. He acquires knowledge not only of the habits but of the beverages of all peoples, and of the cuisine of each nation. The knowledge of what he should have causes him to insist on his rights, and the cook who sends me an underdone steak wrongs me as wofully as a government which should suppress the habeas corpus. The equities of the stomach should not be trifled with, sir." " But what about the bridges ? " I inquired laughingly, "for I must confess I am more interested in your ideas touching bridges than I am touching steaks." " I am not responsible for your obtuseness in nondiscrimination between relative values. But bridges are a hobby with me," retorted the Judge. " I studied civil engineering before I did law, and at that time the great bridges of the world had not been built. I can remember when Stephenson laid the foundation of his AT BREAKFAST. 33 fame with his first bridge, and the poetry of his great endeavors impressed me profoundly. For a bridge, sir, is a poem put into structure, — an imagination of the mind materialized. It stands for an idea, the idea of human brotherhood and the necessity of friendly exchanges, — that the man on the one side of the river cannot get along without help from the man on the other side." " Who built the first bridge, Judge ? " inquired the Man from New Hampshire. "Who built the first bridge ? | It was n't built," rephed the Judge; j it was a gift of nature in the form of a tree, which the winds overturned, so that it stretched its trunk of sohd wood 34 DAYLIGHT LAND. from bank to bank of the stream, or from edge to edge of the chasm, — a bridge for the panther and bear as well as for the hunter, over the buttresses of which leaves waved, and vines twined their f oHage, and under which the torrent thundered and whirled. Man never built a bridge so lovely to look upon as those I have seen in the woods, wind-blown to their places, — the wind-blown bridge of the forest." " Bravo ! bravo !" I exclaimed, and I fluttered the napkin gallantly. | Bravo, Judge ! The poetry of the theme has found its poet." And I passed him a section of a deHcious French omelet. "A reminiscence of Paris," remarked the Judge, smiling as he received it. I More substantial than the pleasures of memory," added the New Hampshire man quietly; and he told the waiter to dupHcate the Judge's order. "There is a characteristic among you New Hampshire men that I admire," remarked the Judge. " You know a good thing when you see it, and you see it mighty quick." "I see an omelet mighty quick when it's as good as yours," was the retort. I The gentlemen are out of order," I exclaimed, rapping on the table. "The question before the house is one of bridges." I Bridge number two," said the Judge, " is that of the settler: two ropes, often woven from roots, with wooden slats intermediate. Then comes the bridge with wooden stringers, planked for heavier travel; then the long enclosed bridge. Mounting still higher AT BREAKFAST. 35 in the rising scale is Stephenson's great work, the Victoria Bridge, old style now, but nevertheless a great achievement in engineering, with its monstrous abutments and its thirty acres of painted surface. Rising still higher, we come to the Suspension Bridge at Niagara, and the magnificent cantilever structure of this road on which we are riding, at Lachine; and crowning all, the great Brooklyn Bridge, over which half a milHon human beings pass each day. I tell you, gentlemen," exclaimed the Judge earnestly, "the history of bridge-building, from that wind-blown tree-trunk in the woods to the latest achievement in engineering skiH, is the history of the human race .not only in material progress, but in the apprehension of man's need of his fellow-man and the brotherhood of the race. Every achievement of man is communal. Every embelHshment in this car makes companionship more entertaining, and draws us closer together by the bond of common refinement." And the Judge proceeded 36 DAYLIGHT LAND. to caH our attention, with critical appreciation, to the carved, the bronzed, and the enameHed elegance of the car. "That picture reminds me," said the New Hampshire man, pointing to one of the embelHshments, a beautiful bit of Japanese enamelling, — " of a Httle bit of personal experience." 1 Waiter," said the Judge, 1 bring us another pot of coffee and a jug of cream. Thank heaven," he ejaculated, " that I have Hved to see the day when one railroad management is so intelHgent as to recognize the fact that a man who is rich enough to pay ten doHars a day to travel in a palace car is accustomed to have real cream in his coffee. Now, Colonel," he continued, after he had poured the rich cream slowly in his cup and as slowly poured the hot fragrant coffee upon it, 11 am ready for your story. I hope it wfll have the flavor of true humor in it as this coffee has the flavor of real Java," and he sipped the deHcious beverage with the deHcacy of one gifted to enjoy the good things of this world. | Oh, it isn't much of a story," repHed the Colonel pleasantly, — " merely a Httle incident." And he fiUed his own cup contentedly. " It was in 1868, or thereabouts," quietly continued the Colonel, I when the Orient began to pour the treasures of her art productions, via New Jersey, into Boston, where alone the culture to discriminate between the false and the true in art is to be found, you know, that I was suddenly seized, as were many others, with the I Japanese craze.' It was a pretty bad attack," he continued reflectively, AT BREAKFAST. 39 — "a pretty bad attack. The papers were fuH of it. Everybody was talking and writing about Japanese art. Now when I buy anything I want it to be first- class, something to be proud of, and feeling mistrustful of my own knowledge, I went to one of the leaders in Boston art circles, and begged a* £jO him to give me the benefit of his educated taste. He kindly consented to do so, and advised me to allow him to purchase a Japanese screen, as that would be a very beautiful and attractive addition to the furniture of my parlor. I gave him the money which he said would be needed to purchase a first-class article. It was a pretty steep sum for a screen, I thought, but I knew I could not expect to get a real gem without paying for it. WeU, the gentleman, after several days of labor exclusively devoted, as he assured me, to visiting the various I Eastern Bazaars,' during which he exhausted the focalizing power of several eyeglasses, succeeded in finding what he was after, a real, genuine, first-class specimen of Japanese art, and the huge screen was 40 DAYLIGHT LAND. sent down to my office. It was certainly a wonderful creation. There was a large-sized Durham cow in the centre of the screen, with an almond-eyed milkmaid, in a very low-necked dress and high-heeled French shoes, milking her. The right eye of the cow was fixed intently on the right-hand corner of the screen, while the left glared straight at you. One eye was considerably larger than the other, and of a different color. I naturally concluded that this was a characteristic of Japanese cows, and mentally made a note of it for use if I should ever be caUed upon to discuss the pecu- Harities of Oriental art. I made a memorandum also of the fact that there was only half of the cow's tail in the picture, but as the artist had forgotten to paint in a fly for her to practice at, that did not much matter. To the front and at the left of the cow sat a Gordon setter, about half the size of the cow and twice as tafl as the girl. The picture affected me so strongly that after I studied it closely, got a photograph of it on my mind, as it were, I quietly shipped it up to my farm in New Hampshire, where I felt there would be room enough for it, and it could add some warmth to the landscape. I hoped also that among my old country neighbors who had never studied high art in Boston it would find plenty of admirers, be a kind of surprise, so to speak. This would have been all right and safe enough if my housekeeper had been a woman of sense and had acted with any judgment; but while cleaning the house one day, she thoughtlessly set the screen out on the lawn, and a series of terrible results followed. In the first place, a herd of cows that a neighbor was AT BREAKFAST. 41 innocently driving along the street caught a glimpse of the cow on the screen and stampeded. The harmless old man was knocked down and seriously injured, while the cows never stopped running until they got into the next township, where they were impounded as vagrants, and that led to a lawsuit which lasted two or three years and impoverished several famiHes. Next a favorite dog of mine, while chasing a rabbit up the road, saw the Gordon setter on the screen, and dropped dead in his tracks. Then a good, honest, faithful girl who did the milking for the family went out and studied the milkmaid on the screen for several minutes, and going back into the house, promptly appHed for her wages " — " That wiH do, Colonel," interrupted the Judge, rising, " that wiH do for your first one." And we ah started for the smoking-room. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. HE ancients dreamed of monstrous beings, possessed of monstrous power. The Christian Scriptures teU of a time when there were giants on the earth, and the sons of God married the daughters of men, namely, of a time 'when the supernal forces were in alHance with the natural, and the hidden energies of the upper reinforced those of the lower sphere. Mythology is full of the same lofty imaginings. Creatures of gigan- tic size are projected upon her canvas : Cyclops, vast, A VERY HOPEFUL MAN. 43 abnormal in strength, one-eyed Hke the headHght of our engine. Had the man who invented the Cyclops invented an engine also, I wonder ? Certainly, an old- fashioned Cyclops would seem no more grotesque or appalling to modern scholars than a Mogul engine to a native on the banks of the Ambesi or the shores of the Nyanza. Then there was Vulcan, that mighty armorer for the gods; and Atlas, on whose broad shoulders rested the world; and Minerva, flashing ' ' O courier of the Empyrean ; and later on came Thor with his hammer, pulverizer of mountains, and the whole body of folk-lore threaded through and through with the puissance of dwarf and gnome, of fairy and sprite. All these and other fashionings of the human mind, purely fanciful or semi-real, have come down to us from that murmuring past of which nothing remains save its murmurings, all suggestive of measure- O ' OO less energies, gigantic forms, and mighty forces. The old-time world at least dreamed of almost infinite power and the works of it, in connection with human forms, or forms suggested by the human." Something Hke this was said by a scholarly-looking man, who stood with the rest of us on the platform of the rear car of the train, as it whirled round the cliff which brought us in sight of the blue waters of Lake O O Superior, as they sparkled and flashed brightly under the Hght of the morning. He who has roUed for fifty o o " miles along the shore of this majestic body of inland water, who has seen the summer sky arching the blue dome above it, its forest-covered islands, the hundreds of islets that dot its surface, its curving beaches of 44 DAYLIGHT LAJSTD. brown and yeUow sand, its deep, secluded bays and rocky promontories, has looked upon one of the most entertaining and charming pictures of the continent, — a picture which dehghts the beholder as he gazes, and remains fixed, with aU its changeful colors, in his memory ever after. I What the ancients dreamed," remarked the Judge, referring to what the scholarly-looking man had said, " we moderns see realized. Our telegraph is swifter than Minerva ; and that common laborer, who is guarding that bridge yonder, can for a shilling send a message faster than they ever dreamed Jupiter could do it. Atlas is no longer a myth. We to-day know the power that holds up the world: it is the same that keeps this car on the track — gravitation. Cyclops is no longer a terror. He is ahead of us, and our engi- O ' O neer has him in perfect control. Thor is our servant, and he pulverizes mountains at so much a cubic foot; while the gnome that bored its way through this spur of quartz, tunnelling it for our passage, is the diamond drill." And as the Judge concluded the sentence, we aU retired into the car, to escape the smoke and the cinders. I It seems to me," continued the scholarly-looking man, after we were seated, "that the thinkers of the world get more credit than they should, as compared with the doers. My Hfe has been spent in the pursuit of letters," he continued, " and my thoughts have been favored with a kindly reception by the world; my writings have brought me both money and fame. But as I have seen the excavations along this line: as I O 7 A VERY HOPEFUL MAN. 47 have been roUed over its bridges, and noted that the fairy-like iron structure beneath me gave no tremor; as I have seen that the soHd sides of cliffs had been cut out for our path as if they were made of chalk, I have felt that the words, and even the thoughts, of J O 7 men, however eloquently expressed, were as nothing when compared with their deeds. I know not who built this road, whose imagination audaciously conceived it, or whose courage constructed it; but whoever did do it has in it erected an imperishable monument." " It is indeed a magnificent result," said a gentleman, an old, gray-headed engineer from Nebraska, who surveyed the route for the Union Pacific, and made for himself a name in that and other trans-continental enterprises, — " a magnificent work indeed." And he gazed thoughtfully through the open door at the level road-bed and gleaming rails. " It cost not only milHons of money, but human Hves as wen," he continued. | On this very section, within a space of twenty miles, over two milHons of doHars' worth of dynamite was used, and some men, I am told, were wounded or blown to pieces." " Dreadful! " exclaimed the scholarly-looking man. | What more horrible death could a man die ? " " I do not regard death by dynamite as the worst of accidents," said a voice. "The devil!" exclaimed the Judge. "What's that, sir ? " and every eye in the compartment was suddenly fixed upon the man. He was not a large man, he was even a smaU one,. 48 DAYLIGHT LAND. and there was nothing fierce or reckless in his appearance, nor would one pick him out as a man speciaUy endowed with courage, or even gifted with extraordinary persistence. He was not a man of full habit, but spare in flesh. His complexion was saUow and leathery. He had large gray eyes, weakly prominent, and somewhat faded. His hair was thin, not positive in color, and his- neck had but Httle base to it. Not one of us had even noticed him before. Indeed, we might have ridden with him for days, and not one of us would have noticed him, had he not given utterance to such a horrible sentiment, an expression which sounded aU the more horrible because of the mildness of the tone which accompanied it. 11 said," repeated the Httle man, looking benevolently at the Judge, — "I said I did not regard death by dynamite as the worst of accidents." !•— A VERY HOPEFUL MAN. 49 The Judge glared at the Httle man for a moment through his eyeglasses. He removed the glasses from his nose, wiped them carefuHy, and replacing them, took another savage look at the man, who sat quietly in the corner. " Gad, sir ! " he exclaimed, at length. " I can't conceive a worse death than being blown to pieces, quick as a flash, without any warning, — think of it, sir, — by dynamite!" " No doubt," returned the Httle man, mildly, " such a death is somewhat sudden, and, physically considered, is Hable to make a total wreck of a man. The conductor told me a few minutes ago that one of the gentlemen who was dynamited was actuaUy distributed — that's the word, as I recaU it, that he used — so much so that there was never anything found of him, only a thumb or some such thing; not enough, it was decided by the authorities, to make a funeral of. Nevertheless, I stiH respectfully maintain that worse things can happen to a man than death by dynamite." I wiH confess that I was never more shocked in my Hfe than at the horrible account which the Httle man in the corner had given of one of the sad accidents which had occurred during the building of the road, and it was made aU the more horrible from his manner of telHng it; for he had told the dreadful tale in the O 7 calmest and most placid of tones, his mild, large gray eyes fixed calmly on the face of the Judge, and without the least movement whatever of any feature of his face. I think I may safely say that every other gentleman of the party felt in the same way, and that the 50 DAYLIGHT LAND. eyes of aU of us were directed upon him in amazement, not to say indignation. I What could a man meet that would be more dreadful?" exclaimed the Judge, excitedly, and he glared at the inoffensive stranger through his eyeglasses as if he would perforate him. The stranger never winced under the stare of the Judge. He did not even appear nettled in the least, for his eyes, without a shade of change in their expression, fixed their gaze placidly upon him, level with his own. " We judge of these things probably from the standpoint of experience," he mildly remarked, " and I have personaUy experienced many things worse than dynamite." " We should be pleased, sir, to hear of your experiences," sneeringly remarked the Judge, and his look was one calculated to burst his eyeglasses from their frames. "It is not worth your attention, gentlemen," he rephed pleasantly, bowing. "It is not worth your attention, I am quite sure, for I have in one sense had nothing remarkable happen to me, and I wiH detain you but a moment, and that because you pleasantly insist upon it," — a hit which must have made the Judge wince. And resuming, he gave us the foUowing vindication of his judgment: — II have been shipwrecked, been baked in a railroad accident, and fired out of a foundry window by a boiler explosion. I was shot in the neck at Gettysburg, suffered starvation in Libby Prison, feU overboard from a ^ A VERY HOPEFUL MAN. 51 transport off Charleston, and left four of my fingers in the mouth of a shark. I had my right arm broken in two places in a New York riot, and stood on a barrel with a halter round my neck in a Southern town, at the outbreak of the great Rebellion, from sunrise to sunset. I was buried under the ruins of a building in San Francisco during an earthquake, and dug out after fifty hours of imprisonment. I have been shot at three times, twice by lunatics and once by a highwayman. I was buried two days by a gas explosion in a mine, and narrowly escaped lynching last year in Arizona ■through mistaken identity. And though I am over fifty, and have nearly lost the use of my right leg; have just had, as I understand, all my property, on which there was no insurance, destroyed by fire in a Western town; and the doctor in New York to whom I went last week for an examination assures me that I wiU soon be bedridden from rheumatism, nevertheless," he added cheerfuUy, " while I undoubtedly have met some obstacles in the past, I stiU refuse to believe that luck is against me." It was not a question of propriety — none of us thought of that. Had we done so our action might have been different. But at the conclusion of the Httle man's narration of his experiences, of the history of his life, there went up a roar of laughter that might have lifted the truck from the rails. In-' deed, it broke up the party. One after another, we went forward to the main compartment of the car, and took our usual seats. Several of the gentlemen apparently began to read, but I noticed that they held their 52 DAYLIGHT LAND. papers as if they were near-sighted, and that the papers shook tiU they rattled. The Judge sat directly ahead of me. In one hand he held his eyeglasses, and with the other he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. At last he turned halfway round in his chair, and bending toward me, while his face was convulsed and the water stood in his eyes, said, — " Dynamite ! Gad! dynamite is n't so bad, after aU ! I sA%Ml -■^m u> t* CHAPTER IV. THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did." And so, if I might judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling. Isaak Walton. CIVILIZATION means luxury," said the Judge sententiously, as he looked complacently over the dinner-table, with its snowy linen, its dehcate china, its burnished plate, its cut-glass ware, and its vase of woodland flowers. " It is that fine arrangement by which matter is made to minister to mind, the lower compeUed to assist the higher. The provision made for travel is the best measure of American progress." "Analyze the matter, Judge," I said, as I passed 54 DAYLIGHT LAND. bim the menu. " Analyze the matter, and teU us what civilization has to do with you and me at this moment." " BouiUon," said the Judge to the waiter. I Mock-turtle," I added. ■ >; ;,« d£8$ m m fgw$@i??^i^ f^ I Mock-turtle is too heavy for summer," said the Judge peremptorily to me. " Like the majority of Americans, you have Hved in spite of yourself. You have the senses of a Greek and the appetite of a barbarian. The man who eats mock-turtle soup in summer is a proof that the principle of divine preservation is stiU active." THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. 55 " There's nothing to bouiUon," I retorted. " It's only water with a hint of a flavor in it, and the hint is n't always very plain, either." "That's the beauty of it," returned the Judge. " That's the beauty of it," he exclaimed, as he fixed a dainty boutonniere of choice flowers stolen from the vase to the lapel of his coat. " The civiHzed man abhors grossness. The barbarian feeds at a trough. Edu- cate him, and he erects a table. Knife and fork replace his fingers, and as you refine him the number of his dishes increases, adornments multiply, until at last he is lifted to that level upon which you and I Hve, where the nose and the eye eat with the mouth, and the furniture of the table, in the elegance of its appointments, magnifies the feast." By this time, the soup had been brought, and for a moment the conversation ceased. We were running between some lofty hills. Here and there we passed a smaU clearing, with its Httle log-house in the centre. Each narrow field was a mass of woodland flowers, scarlet, purple, and white, standing as if planted in separate beds, characterizing the field with color. The cabins here and there were covered with clambering vines, and on their sodden roofs the birds and winds, those planters of the air, had sown the seeds for flowering, fruitful growth. Outside, the world was warm and odorous. The wild-flowers sweetened it, and the wind which blew the scented air through our open windows and into our nostrils brought from the lofty hiUs wUd, gamy scents, and pungencies of fir and pine. The Judge sipped his bouiUon delicately, as if every 56 DAYLIGHT LAND. drop were a separate ministration to his palate. His eyes contemplated with pleased satisfaction, not only the glorious color of the flowers, the green of the hills, and the blue sky, but also the amber-tinted Hquid in his spoon; while his nostrils expanded as if they would inhale more abundantly the perfume that drifted through the window. It was impossible not to see in bim the incarnation of refined physical enjoyment, a man who honored his appetite by gratifying it, but who gratified it in a manner so deHcate that he not only redeemed it from the least appearance of gross- ness, but made its gratification the means for the display of his virtues. " I have traveUed," remarked the Judge reflectively, " in most of the countries of the world. I have suffered in the tropics from heat, and in the Arctic regions from cold. For the sake of seeing a few old ruins, mostly buried in sand, I have borne the agony of prolonged thirst on the Desert, and that I might go a Httle farther than some one else up some river or over some mountain, I have inflicted upon my body the pangs which precede starvation. But I have come to that period of Hfe in which man ceases to be an impulsive, and becomes a reasoning, animal. And while the spirit of the tourist is in me as strongly as ever, I nevertheless insist that, in return for my money, civilization shaU give me, as I journey, three things: safety, comfort, luxury. If it wiU give me these, — and I assure you thousands feel as I do upon the subject, — I will give my money, and go and see what it has that is new to show me. If not, I wiU stay at home." wm THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. 59 I must confess that I was impressed with the conclusion that the Judge had reached, the more so, perhaps, because it was the first time I had ever heard it so clearly formulated ; and I presume my face manifested the interest which I felt in his Hne of remark, for after he had tasted of each of the vegetables before him, as O 7 a lady might examine several samples of lace, and deftly prepared the fish for its dressing, he resumed: — " I am an illustration of my theory, sir. I have crossed the continent twenty times, I presume. I have traveled on every other Hne repeatedly, but I had never seen the prairie lands west of Winnipeg, which an old friend who came over this route last summer wrote me - were as beautiful as the vaUey of the Platte, and as lovely as the Laramie plains — the most beautiful stretch of prairie land in the world,' he said. And from the Black Canon of the Fraser River he wrote me eight pages describing it. He is nearly seventy years old, bear in mind; — eight pages of description — an old forty-niner at that — that was simply wfld, sir, wild and extravagant as the description of a boy; and it is because of those letters from my old friend concerning these Canadian prairies we shaU see to-morrow, and the four hundred miles of mountain scenery lying west of the prairies, that I undertook the journey. But, sir," he added, with emphasis, "I would never have undertaken it unless I had ascertained that I could travel with safety and with comfort, and be provided, as I journeyed, with certain luxuries." " Nevertheless, Judge," I remarked, " the lovehness and majesties of nature are a compensation for occasional deprivations, are they not?" 60 DAYLIGHT LAND. 1 Within certain limitations, I should agree with you," he rephed. " But for myself, the amber of my bouiUon assists me to appreciate more perfectly the flowers blooming in that Httle clearing. The taste of this salmon in my mouth makes that stretch of water yonder seem more charming; and I am confident that the ice-cream, the nuts, and the coffee which I see are provided for our dessert wiU give to the sky a bluer tint, and add softness to the fleece of yonder clouds." Thus the conversation flowed on, whUe the train ghded along past the beaches of the bays that set deeply into the mountains which characterize, with their massive formations, the northern shore of Lake Superior. The Judge was in his best mood, and talked as only one who has seen much of the world, its peoples, and its ways can talk. Each course was duly honored, as if it were the only one to be enjoyed, and the " table hour," as the Judge, with a pleasant conceit, named it, was the one so utiHzed that while it ministered most fully to the wants of the body, it contributed beyond any other to the pleasures of the mind. I Hello ! " I exclaimed, as I glanced at the time-table, which, in the form of an illustrated itinerary, lay on the table. " We must be nearing the Nepigon." I The Nepigon ! " exclaimed the Judge, with the ardor of a sportsman. " More monstrous trout have been caught in the Nepigon than in any other river on the continent. I have friends who firmly beheve that it is one of the four sacred rivers that flowed out of Paradise." think I would agree with them," I laughingly" THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. 61 returned, " if they would make their Paradise include not only the river, but the lake in which it heads. For if Lake Nepigon was not in Paradise, it was a great loss for Paradise." And as I spoke, the train struck the bridge which stretches across the noble and noted river, and as it was ghding smoothly on it slowed, and suddenly stopped. | Oh ! oh ! oh ! I I See, Tom ! Look ! " " Jones, where are you ? " " Fo' de Lawd, Mars' Judge ! " exclaimed the waiter. I You two gem'men git to de hind end ob de kyar, ef you wants ter see what 's gwine on down dar in dat «/ O ribber! " The excitement was contagious, for the car was full of shouts, cheers, and exclamations. The Judge rushed down the aisle to the rear- of the car — I Great heavens ! " he exclaimed, as he reached the platform. " Look at that! " A hundred feet below us flowed the noble current, a deep, wide, strong-moving mass of water. Here and there an eddy marked it with its huge circumference. But in the main it moved downward toward the great lake, shining in full view, as a river flows between wid- 7 O J ened banks and with plenty of room. In the middle of the river nearly under us was a canoe with an Indian at either end, and a man in a velveteen jacket standing in the centre. In his hands was a rod, and the tip of the rod was doubled backward nigh to the reel, the ringing whir of which fiUed the air. His pose was that of an angler who had struck a fish — a big fish, a fish 62 DAYLIGHT LAND. that is fighting him gamely and stubbornly, and which he is resisting with the cool, determined skill of a vet- O ' eran of the rod. " What a picture ! " exclaimed the Judge. " Gad ! what a picture ! " Well might he exclaim, " What a picture ! " The wide river; the island-studded lake, into which it emptied; the lofty banks ; the great dome of blue sky above; high over the stream, as if hung in mid-air, the long train, every window filled with heads, every platform crowded with forms, the engineer, an angler himself, hanging out of the cab, swinging his hat; below, 7 O O O O 7 7 the canoe, the ochred Indians, the bent body of the angler, the swaying, quivering, doubled-up rod, — what a picture! Suddenly, we who were looking saw the rod straighten. Some of us knew what it meant. The Judge clinched my arm, and in an instant out of the water came the trout, mouth open, fins extended, tail spread. I Jerusalem! " screamed the Judge. " He 's a twenty-pounder !" Dear old Judge, thou hadst the true angler's eye — that eye which enlarges and multipHes by a happy trick of vision, not merely the size of the fish, but the enjoyment of the soul. Ay, ay, it was a twenty- pounder to both of us old sports for the instant, and if the envious scales did shrink the noble form to shorter and thinner proportions, it could not rob us of the ecstasy of our first estimate, thank heaven ! And the fight that foUowed — what words may set .Ml »•— -^ JERUSALEM! HE'S A TWENTY-POUNDER! THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. 65 it forth ? 0 anglers, shut your eyes, and see and hear it from behind your closed Hds. CaU memory to your aid — the memory of the sternest fight you ever fought, of the swiftest torrent, of the wildest pool, of that favorite rod smashed to splinters, of paddle broken, of the " biggest fish that ever swam " lost or won. Stop, I say, and from behind closed Hds see aU this, and you wiH see what we saw under the great bridge over the O O Nepigon on that bright June day. . Whoever the Man in the Velveteen Jacket might be, O 7 he was of the right sort, an angler of whom anglers o * o O need never be ashamed ; for as he fought that fish he ? O gave us such an exhibition of angler's fence as ranked o o him one of the best that ever fingered reel. An eight- O O ounce rod against an eight-pound fish, a strong, deep current, and a Nepigon canoe: grant anglers such conditions, and how many shall make a winning fight ? Twice the huge fish broke water, and twice the long train cheered him to the echo. The Judge was wild. Each time the fish broke the surface, he fairly jumped. He leaned far over the rail. He swung his hat, and when the monstrous trout broke the surface the second time, he yeUed,— I Save him, save him, and I'll nominate you for the Presidency !" Once the great fish for an instant burst through his opponent's guard. Once I must confess my heart sank within me, as a stone sinks to the bottom of a weU. When he was a hundred feet from the canoe, the rod nearly tip and butt, and the silk line stretched through the air Hke a wire, the fish doubled and lanced back- 66 DAYLIGHT LAND. ward like a flash. We saw his wake, — that sharpened wedge of water which anglers dread, — and as he went O ^ under the canoe, and in the stillness that had come to us we heard the Hne rattle on the bark, a groan escaped the Judge. He roUed his eyes upward, and roared as if stricken with pain, — I Great Scott! he 1 lost him ! " But the fish was not lost. The angler recovered his advantage, and fought the fight to the end, skilfuUy O 7 O C? a' la1 and cooUy. The fish was deftly gaffed by one of the Indians, and quickly lay on the bottom of the canoe. The Indians seized their paddles, and the Hght craft glanced toward the western bank, the man un jointing his rod as the boat shot along, and in a moment they came panting up the embankment with a-huge hamper in their hands, in which, amid flowers and grasses, lay six other trout, nearly as large as the one we had seen captured. Seldom is such a reception granted to a mortal as was given to the Man in the Velveteen Jacket. The engineer cheered and swung his hat; the fireman, sooted and begrimed, capered and danced on the coal- box like an electrified imp ; the passengers yeUed ; the ladies fluttered their handkerchiefs; whUe we anglers of the party fairly took him in our arms and lifted him on to the platform, where the Judge enfolded him in an embrace which the stranger wfll never forget, — a O O 7 hug such as an old angler gives a younger one to whom he is indebted for an exhibition of skill which has brought back to his memory aU his own former victories, and proved to his anxious soul that the gentle ait is not being neglected. THE BIG NEPIGON TROUT. 67 Never fear, never fear, dear old Judge, that the art of aU arts wiU be lost, or the skiU of trained finger and eye be forgotten. We shaU pass ; but stiH the streams wiH flow on, the pools wiU go round, and the trout love the coolness of springs and the rush of swift waters. The boys wiU grow up Hke their sires, loving water and sun, loving forest and rapids. With brown faces and hands, and with eyes keen as ours, they wiU stand where we stood, they wiH boat where we boated, they wiU camp where we camped, and the dead ashes of fires that we kindled they wiU kindle to new life again. The gentle art wiU Hve on, whUe nature is O O ' nature and mankind is man. Wtefieitisa- CHAPTER V. THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. A merrier man Within the limit of becoming mirth I never spent an hour's talk withal. "HE chief est charm of travel is found, perhaps, in the novel and entertaining characters that we meet, and the pleasant rencontres which occur. t fThe sweetest flowers wiU not come to us; we must go to them./ They grow in the nooks and corners of fences, in cracks and crannies of the rocks, in crevices of the cliffs, in strange out-of-the-way places, where only the eye and the nose of the trailer may find them. In respect to human companionship it is the same; the quaint, the inteUi- gent, the charming, the original and piquant personalities of the race are not born in groups; they are not THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 69 found in clusters, nor can we caU them to our homes. To find them we must travel; we must look them up; we must go where they are; we must put ourselves upon currents which cross their currents, and so, Hke birds flying at random, be blown together. «/ O 7 -***5 The finest dehght of travel is that of the casual companionships it brings us, the smiles and the bright faces that we see, the kindly hands that we clasp, or the warm hearts that we meet in our need. These make the charm of journeying, and cause the recoUec- tions of voyaging to be so deHghtful. J O O O And this man—this Man in the Velveteen Jacket — was such a gift to our party. It is true, he had come to us recommended as no other man might be. His introduction accredited him to our feUowship as the word of a king might not do, and from the moment he entered our circle it was as one who belonged there, as one who filled a place that had waited for him and remained unfilled until he came ; and into it he dropped without undue familiarity, on the one hand, and without the least awkwardness or embarrassment, on the other. His manners were simply charming, because of a happy mingling of modesty and self-possession. He was a natural humorist. His humor was so quaint that it amused, and so gravely expressed that it puzzled. As you looked at his face and listened to the tones of his voice, you were divided in feeling as to whether you were Hstening to fiction or to fact; and even amid your laughter at the ludicrousness of the creation, you found yourself querying whether the source of the 70 DAYLIGHT LAND. fun at which you were laughing was not found in some serious occurrence. " You did it weU," said the Judge, referring to his contest with the trout. " You never made a miss with eye or finger. You handled the rod as only a man can who has handled it from boyhood." The Man in the Velveteen Jacket looked at the Judere for a moment, with the most mirthful of Hghts O | c in his eyes, as one who found in his positive assertion a suggestion of fun, which aU of us appreciated at the Judge's expense when he remarked, — " I am happy to think that my manner of fighting the fish met the approbation of an old angler Hke yourself, but as measured by time I would scarcely be regarded as an expert, for I never touched a rod tiU I was twenty-five." % Incredible ! " exclaimed the Judge. " Why, sir, I have always maintained that no man could become an expert with the rod unless he began practice with it as a boy, — grew up with it, as it were." " Nevertheless," continued the stranger pleasantly, " the fact is as I have stated it. Until I was twenty- five I used the gun. Shooting was a passion with me. It was my favorite pastime, and I presume I should never have used the rod at aU — which I have done exclusively since a certain event — unless I had met with a great misfortune, caused by a dog, — a misfortune which made me lose aU taste for shooting and the sight of a bird dog absolutely disagreeable to me. Yes, gentlemen," continued the Man in the Velveteen Jacket, earnestly, " my last experience with a dog was ■I*- MT. CARROLL, FROM THE WEST. ■I- THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 73 a most unfortunate one, and although years have elapsed since I met it, I cannot recaU it, even at this distance of time, without an involuntary shudder. Strange that a man's Hfe can be seriously affected by what seems at the start a trivial event! But I assure you that my profession, the location of my residence, and my domestic connection, are aU to-day different from what they would have been had I never met that dog." It is needless to say that the astonishing statement of our companion excited our curiosity to a degree, and our looks doubtless plainly apprised him of the fact; for after a moment's pause, he took his pipe from his mouth, and having emptied the ashes into the cuspidor as carefuUy as if he were smoking in a friend's parlor, with his friend's wife sitting in the next room, in exact range of the door which commanded his position, he continued, — " Perhaps it is only fair that I should satisfy your curiosity, which I see I have awakened by what may seem to you an extraordinary statement; and if it wiU entertain you to hear a story which has Httle to recommend it save its novelty and its sadness, I wiH, at the cost of painful reminiscence, teU it to you." Upon this the Judge, who, because of the dignity of his official position as weU as of his years, and, I may add, the urbanity of his manners, was by mutual assent of us aU regarded as the natural spokesman of the party, repHed, — " I must confess that I am curious to hear the history of the dog, or of your experiences with the dog „ 74 DAYLIGHT LAND. and I doubt not that aU the gentlemen here share this sentiment with me; and if your feelings wiU aUow you to satisfy our curiosity, I beg you to do so. For it does seem extraordinary that a dog should be able to influence a man's Hfe to such an extent as to change the direction of his activities, and even affect his domestic environment." I You must know, then, gentlemen," resumed the man, " that I studied for the practice of medicine, and was engaged to the daughter of a noted physician, who Hved in the northern section of Vermont and enjoyed a large and lucrative country practice. He was a man of large attainments and of a high spirit. His only daughter was a young lady of unusual beauty, and had been endowed at birth with a Hberal 'share of her father's abiHties and his excitable temperament. She was a lovely girl, and, being sole heiress prospectively to the old doctor's property, was much courted by her gentlemen acquaintances. When, therefore, our engagement became known I was, with good reason, heartily congratulated by the generous, and cordially hated by the envious. I had just been graduated at the medical school, and at the close of my summer vacation it was arranged that the lady and myself should be married. This would enable me to begin my practice under her father, the old doctor, whose business would thus naturally, in the course of time, faU into my hands. I submit, gentlemen, if any young man ever stood face to face with a more auspicious future. I was soon to be united to a beautiful girl, with an ample fortune, and be thereby admitted to I*- THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 75 a professional connection which was both gratifying to my vanity and satisfactory to my ambition. And even now, after years have passed, I cannot recaU without emotion that I lost wife and fortune, and that a most beautiful arrangement of Providence was disturbed, broken up, smashed, so to speak, by a miserable dog." By this time, as can weU be imagined, we were aU of us intensely interested in the gentleman's narrative. We felt that his had been no common experience, but that in the Hfe of the Man in the Velveteen Jacket there was embodied a series of startHng mishaps, and that, however he might strive to disguise it by forced calmness of voice or restraint of feature, we were nevertheless about to listen to the recital of a lif elong bereave- ment — perhaps of a tragedy. We therefore drew our circle the more closely around him, that we might not lose a single word that came from his Hps. And I could see that the Judge, who was endowed with acute sensi- biHties, had propheticaUy sensed what was coming, for his eyes gHstened appreciatively behind his glasses, and his large checked silk handkerchief was spread care- fuUy over his plump knees, ready to his hand. " It aU happened in this way," he continued, after a moment's silence, devoted doubtless by him to sad recoUections. " It all happened in this way. A few days after Commencement, when I had everything packed, and was ready to go to the doctor's to make the preliminary arrangements for the wedding, a club of feHow-sportsmen invited me to dinner. I had, of course, a most enjoyable evening. I beheve there was not a man at the table over whose dog I had not shot; J 76 DAYLIGHT LAND. and between the speeches, the songs, the anecdotes, and the reminiscences of flood and field, our mirthful- ness was unbounded. AU knew of the good fortune ahead of me, and each and every one, I verily beHeve, heartily rejoiced at it. Amid all the changes of Hfe," said the Man in the Velveteen Jacket reflectively, " amid aU the changes of Hfe, and the passage of years which have obhterated much, I have never forgotten that happy evening, or the features of a single face around those tables." " Amen !" exclaimed the Judge, who was himself a noted sportsman. " Amen to the noble sentiment. ..There is no comradeship like that of the woods and waters, no friendship like that of out-door men/> And the old sportsman's eulogy was greeted by the applause of us aU. " The next morning I was at my bank, getting a check cashed, en route for the depot, and being pressed for time, was getting hurriedly into a coupe at the door, when two friends — a committee appointed by the club — rushed up to the carriage, having a large pointer dog and a speech to deHver to me. I hastily explained my position to them: that I had n't a minute to spare, and that I must reach the train; that the coupe was f uU of parcels and baskets ; that I was truly grateful, but I did not see how I could make room — " I am not sure that my friends heard me clearly, for there was a great noise in the street, and the driver, who knew that there was n't an instant to lose, had started his horse. Be that as it may, the dog was THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 77 deHvered to me. For, unfortunately, the window of the coupe was open, and my two friends, seizing the dog in their hands, pushed him with great merriment through the aperture, throwing a huge parchment pedigree into my lap at the same time. " As might be expected, the dog was considerably distributed when he landed in the carriage. One muddy forefoot went in between my shirt-front and white vest, and the other lanced along the back side of my neck. His right hind foot was buried in a basket of grapes, and his left had ploughed through a huge and costly bouquet of flowers, bursting the band which held them together. StiU, I reflected that the dog wasn't to blame for being so unceremoniously thrust through a window, and the motive on the part of my friends which prompted the gift was touching. So I coUected the different parts of the dog as much as I could, brought him to one centre, as it were, and pressing him down between my legs, tied him by a neck-rope to a big telescope vaHse on the seat beside me. " I had just got the dog safely fixed in this manner, and was coUecting the scattered flowers, when the coupe thundered up to the depot. The Jehu jumped ■ from his box and threw open the door, crying, j Hurry up, zur, not a minit to spare.' " I grabbed the basket of grapes in one hand, my hat-box in the other, and jumped to the pavement. But the dog was as anxious to get out as I was. For as I was making my exit he bolted between my legs, my big valise was yanked from the seat, and striking 78 DAYLIGHT LAND. me between the shoulders, knocked me on top of the dog. Thinking I had done it on purpose, he whipped his tail between his legs and rushed into the depot, yelling at every jump, with the vahse thumping along after him, whUe I plunged for it in order to recapture the dog. " Now there happened to be a big, corpulent hack- man carrying a huge trunk on his shoulders across the platform, and my dog, like an infernal idiot, fetched a circle clean round his legs, and then started to jump the track. The man's feet were jerked from under him, the big trunk dropped heavUy to the platform and burst open, and my valise flew around and hit him in the stomach as he sat down; whUe the dog, who had begun to feel that he was being unjustly treated, doubled back and charged at the big hackman with O O bared teeth and tail stiff as a ramrod. I never saw a madder man or a worse muss in my life. The hackman addressed ine in language which was simply frightful, and I was inexpressibly grateful when, with the help of a brakeman, I succeeded in getting that- dreadful dog into the baggage-car and saw him lashed o oo o safely to a stanchion. The flowers were lost, the •basket of grapes was left behind, my clothes were tracked aU over as if I had served as a mat to a dog- kennel, and my poor valise looked as tired as a compositor at four o'clock in the morning. " I got an express tag and wrote my name on it, and where I was going, gave the dog some water and the baggage-master two doUars to put him off carefully at the station where I was to stop, and then I went back "I*- 'mJmmaAWm^QM mammm mm? THE HACKMAN. -rf THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 81 to the parlor car and spent an hour with the porter in getting the dog tracks off my wardrobe. "WeU, along in the afternoon, when we had got weU up into Vermont, the train stopped at a smaU station for wood and water, and I stroUed forward to see if my dog was aU right and make his acquaintance a Httle. To my horror, I discovered that a new baggage-man had come aboard, and reading the directions wrongly, had put my dog off at a viUage nearly fifty mUes back in New Hampshire. There was only one thing to do, and that was to go back after him. Fortunately the down train was due in a few moments, and when it came in I boarded it. I reached the town about seven in the evening, and not a bit too soon, for my dog had already made a record for himself, and was acting in a manner to secure an obituary notice of at least a column in length in the next issue of the viUage paper. The station-master had received him from the baggage-man, and not knowing to whom he should deHver him, had very properly tied him to a trunk in the baggage-room, locked him in, and gone home. In two or three hours he became tired of waiting, and gnawing his rope in two went out through the window, taking half the sash with him. No sooner had he touched the ground than the station-master's dog pitched upon him, and after a short experience he started up the principal street of the viUage, as near the centre as a dog in a hurry could estimate with my dog in exact Hne and only one jump behind him. The two had gone into the station-agent's house, as near the same instant as they could have done if they had prac- 1 82 DAYLIGHT LAND. ticed a hundred years. The man was at supper with his f amUy, in the act of saying grace, and when the two dogs went under the table they lifted it as much as three feet straight up in the air. The agent's wife went into hysterics, his oldest daughter fainted where she sat, and the man, without waiting to coUect his own dog, chased mine into the street with a shot-gun in his hand, yelling I Mad dog ! mad dog!' at the top of his voice. He would undoubtedly have kiUed my dog, had he not stopped to take aim, and it was owing to this shght mistake, probably, that my dog escaped with his life. " I never knew how I got out of that town aHve, for I insulted every man that spoke to me, and got into two fights whfle the light lasted. But I did, and had the dog with me, too, for I was pretty hot over the treatment we both had received in that viUage, and moreover, I hold that every man ought to stand by his dog." " That's right," said the Judge, as he wiped his eyes. " Yes, every man ought to stand by his dog, in court and out of court." And for several minutes the Man in the Velveteen Jacket was unable to proceed because of the emotions his story had eHcited from those who sat Hstening to his vivid narration. " But aU this," he resumed at length, — " aU this, in itself considered, was of very Httle importance, nothing more than any man who has had a dog with a pedigree given him might expect to have happen. I would not even have mentioned it were it not that it is- THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. necessary you should know these precedent trivialities in order that you may appreciate what foUows, and understand how it was that the dog ruined me, and I became an angler. " I got the dog home at last, and put him into the hospital, for he had been considerably rattled and was out of repairs, so to speak. So I wrote to my fiancee that I was unexpectedly detained from my anticipated visit by a sprained ankle, but that I had the ankle under treatment, and would surely be with her the next week. I also told her that I had been presented with a beautiful pointer dog, one of the HveHest and brightest animals I had ever met, and that I would bring J O my pet over when I came, and I pleasantly added the foUowing: — "' P. S. How deHghtful it is, my darling, that both of us have a pet, — you a favorite cat, I an amiable dog, — with which to begin our married life and en- Hven our domestic circle.' " Alas! how Httle," exclaimed the Man in the Velveteen Jacket plaintively, — " how Httle can we mortals anticipate what is ahead of us! " The dog was one of those irrepressible specimens of canine exuberance that you could but admire," he continued. " He Was a born hunter, if there ever was one. He was nobly free from partiahty, and hunted one class of objects as reacHly as another. AU scents in his nose meant game. An old hen was a deHght to his soul, and a calf kept his spirits from depression. A stray pig was a godsend, and a timid, half-broken colt threw him into ecstacies. But if there was one 84 DAYLIGHT LAND. thing on the earth that he yearned for more than an- O ** other, it was a cat. A large, weU-buflt, positive-minded, masculine cat represented a whole hemisphere of game to him. He was a bird-dog nominally, but practicaUy his pedigree starred him with universal adaptations. Nevertheless, at the sight of a cat he became supersensitive. At that moment there was no hesitation in him. He acted spontaneously and in a straight Hne. At such an opportunity he was always at fuU cock and went off himself. Then it was that he seemed possessed of a human soul, and to realize that beautiful moral maxim that I he who hesitates is lost.'' " Oh, Lord!" said the Judge, and reaching up to his Hnen duster he extracted a fresh handkerchief. It was not because there was any remarkable humor in the story that the Man in the Velveteen Jacket was telling that we were affected so strongly, but because O O J 7 of his happy mannerism in telling it, and the Hghtness of our own dispositions. For he told it with a quaint- ness of expression and a Hghtness of touch that left nothing to be desired by the hearer, and aU of us were in a mind to be tickled, and hence we received the reflections of his humor as the water receives the sky, and I have often noted that the humor of the humorist and that of the audience equally contribute to the laughter that ensues. Be this as it may, we aU laughed with the abandonment of chUdren at the narrative he was telling. And when he began again he cj O © did so with even a quicker movement and a HveHer manner of expression. If it were fiction he was narrating, he had evidently begun to enjoy it as if it were THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 85 real; and if it were fact, the original sadness of the event was now whoUy obhfcerated by the mirthfulness of the recoUection. " A happier man than I never breathed the morning air," he resumed, " when I started across the country to visit the home of my betrothed. I pictured to myself, as I swung along the country road, the joy of our meeting and the happiness of our future Hves. I knew that the old doctor had a temper Hke a Turk, and that my beloved was impulsive. But I reflected with satisfaction that the one could not in the order of nature Hve forever, and that the earnest temperament of the other would doubtless be mollified by the softening influence of my example. " My dog, to which I had aHeady become attached, shared the buoyancy of my spirits. He fastened himself joyfully on to every calf that he met, and abbreviated the tafl of every chicken he encountered. The whole country grew profane in his wake, and I knew that every shot-gun was being loaded for his return. Happy in the excitement he created, he distributed his favors on either side of the road with ingenuous impartiaHty, and hunted with equal zest the pigs in the meadows and the cats in the porches. The dogs that limped into their kennels after he had passed were dazed with the quickness of their experience, and I doubt not that the reHgious element of that section remembers to this day his advent as a visitation. 11 shaU never be able, gentlemen, to make you understand what happened. Even to me, after years 86 DAYLIGHT LAND. of reflection, it remains a nightmare of wfld sights and savage sounds; a kaleidoscopic mixture of colors and forms; a vision of a dreadful meeting and a more awful parting, — a meeting and a parting which, from the circumstances of the case, could never be repeated. " With fond anticipations I turned a corner in the road and suddenly stood within a few rods of the house; and there, gentlemen, oh, there was my fiancee waving her handkerchief to me, whUe the old doctor, seated in his gig, was proudly showing off the paces of a half- broken four-year-old colt he had recently purchased. ImpeUed by feelings too strong to be restrained, I swung my hat joyfuUy over my head, gave a cheerful haUoo, and rushed forward. That infernal idiot of a dog, 0-7 hearing my cry, seeing me swinging my hat and rushing down the road, went for that prancing colt Hke a freckled meteor. The colt saw him coming and gave o o a tremendous bound, and as the dog went under him in a cloud of dust, he opened two holes as big as a hat through the dashboard of the gig, and then bolted down the road. " Never did I see a horse and a dog lay themselves lower down to the ground. Each was running from a o o motive, and each had an object in view. Under such favorable conditions their pace was terrific and both attended strictly to business. The old doctor was standing up in the gig, his stubbly gray hair pointing toward the home he was leaving, pulling Hke a windlass at the reins, his linen duster flying behind him, and a stream of smaU bottles pouring out of each pocket! 1 I m > -< o o THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 89 " I stood hat in hand aghast at the sight, but — I swear to you, gentlemen, had I died for it the next minute, I could not have helped it — laughing until the tears stood in my eyes. Suddenly I looked at my betrothed, and then I nearly dropped. I saw by the look in her face that it was aU up with me, that my world had stopped, and that the sun would nevermore rise on the hiUs of my love. I She thought I had set that miserable dog on the colt! I She never opened her mouth, but sflently went into the house. I foUowed. I spoke as a man naturaUy would in such circumstances. There was no haughtiness in my voice. She simply turned and looked at me. Gentlemen, there was no love hi her eyes, not a trace ! Then she said, — " j Sir !! !' " StiU I fought for my Hfe. Wife and fortune were O «/ trembling in the balance. I saw it. I pleaded. I knelt, — yes, I knelt at her feet; I poured out my vows; I seized her unwilling hand; I saw I was making headway. She began to relent. There was a chance, a fighting chance, as it were. My heart bounded with O O 7 *i hope. Gentlemen, I should have won, — I give you my word, I should have won. By a close calculation of chances, you can see I should have won. When, — suddenly I heard a sound, — a sound I recognized, and glancing toward the door, there! — there stood that damnable dog! And that was n't the worst of it, O _ he was looking at something ! looking steadfly and fixedly at something, with that coppery and unearthly 90 DAYLIGHT LAND. look in his eyes I had grown to know so weU. Involuntarily I foUowed the direction of his gaze, and, Great Caesar's Ghost! there under the centre-table I saw my fiancee's cat — a monstrous, masculine cat, as yeUow as saffron and ugly as Satan ! I Gentlemen, you would Hke to know what foUowed ? I cannot teU you. It was bedlam let loose in that beautiful home ! My betrothed gave one scream as the dog and cat met, then fainted. I managed to get her out of the room and into the hands of a servant at the other end of the house, and then I went back and looked into the apartment. There was nothing to be seen but revolving remnants of furniture and an atmosphere of yeUow and brown which occasionaUy condensed itself in the centre and theri broke again into concentric rings. But I knew what was there nevertheless. I knew that in that yeUow and brown atmosphere there were two separate, individual entities, and that they were anatomically hostile and chemicaUy opposite; that sooner or later those two entities would be resolved into their elements or would lie on that floor side by side, dead; and that there would be woe in that house; and that it was no place for me to be found in after the old doctor had returned. " Under such awful circumstances I left the house. I never went back to it, for the next morning I heard that the doctor had been brought home in a cart, and that distributed resemblances to a cat had been coUected and buried in the garden. No tidings reached me of my dog and I beHeved him to be dead. But I was mistaken. I packed my valise ; I started for the train I^SS 'THE DOG AND CAT MET." THE MAN IN THE VELVETEEN JACKET. 93 with the f eeling of a man who has lost aU and to whom therefore no venture has the terror of a risk. I determined to leave the country forever and come West. For there, I reflected, if anywhere on the earth, amid new scenes, pursuits, and companionship, I should be able to forget the miseries of the past or school myself to endurance. " With these thoughts in my mind I hurried to the depot, for the whistle of the express had already sounded, and hastily paying for my ticket started for the platform. When, — Great Heavens ! what should I see but that irrepressible dog, jauntily trotting across the viUage Common with his eye open for adventure, and evidently seeking his unfortunate master. " And this is the reason, gentlemen, why I gave up shooting and became an angler." o o At the closing word the signal sounded, the train stopped, under a strong appHcation of the brakes, on the banks of a magnificent stream, which tumbled down from the mountains in a succession of jumps, into wide, deep pools. " Keep the trout," exclaimed the man gayly, as he swung himself down from the railing, and landed amid wUd flowers that bloomed as high as his waist; " keep the trout for your larder; I shall duplicate the string- before evening." I Give us your card," yelled the Judge, as the train started, and he flung his own pasteboard upon the track; " give us your card; how shall I know where to find you next summer ? " 94 DAYLIGHT LAND. " I have n't any card," returned the stranger, calling pleasantly to us as the train receded, " but come next year to the Nepigon and bring aU your friends, and you '11 find the Man in the Velveteen Jacket on one of the pools." CHAPTER VI. THE CAPITALIST. .Great contest follows and much learned dust Involves the combatants, each claiming truth, And Truth disclaiming: both. NE of the largest cities on the conti- > nent wiU stand here within fifty * years," said the Judge; and he spoke as a man accustomed to know the reasons for his judgment. This sentence was dehvered to our group as we stood on the wharf at Port Arthur, watching the huge steamer, just in from Owen's Sound, unload its monstrous cargo of freight. Its passengers, having landed an hour before, were now roUing west- *m 96 DAYLIGHT LAND. ward to the prairies, the mountains, and the shores of the mild ocean. " I think just as you do," said a gentleman near us; " I think just as you do, sir; and," he added firmly, " I have put up money on my faith." The voice sounded familiar, very famiHar. I glanced at him, but I could not place him for an instant; and then — why, certainly, — the years do change us, — don't they ? Gray ? of course he should be gray, and I thought of my own head, and, advancing a step, reached out my hand. " Mr. PeppereU," I said, " I am deHghted to greet you; I did not recognize you at first; your hair is whiter than it once was. Every strong stalk flowers at last, eh ? " 11 did not recognize you, either," rephed Mr. PeppereU, returning my greeting with cordiality. " I did n't recognize you, either, at first, but it was n't because of your whiter head, but because of the bronze on your face. You look Hke an Indian from the plains." " I feel Hke an Indian at least three times a day," I rephed ; " and the Judge here is making an epicure of me. Mr. PeppereU, aUow me to present you to Judge John Doe, of San Francisco," I added. " Judge, this is Mr. PeppereU of Boston, a capitalist of the Hub, and, better than aU, a gentleman. I am happy to be the means of bringing you two together." I said it heart- Uy, for I knew them both to be gentlemen of standing, amiabiHty, and wit. "May I ask, Mr. PeppereU," I said, after he had THE CAPITALIST. 97 been presented to the other members of the party, " may I ask on what grounds you expect a city to be bunt here in this great opening between the mountains, on the shores of Thunder Bay ? " " The site of great cities," answered Mr. PeppereU, 1 — and he spoke with that positiveness of expression and breadth of knowledge which characterizes the sue- cessful American, — " the site of great cities is a matter of geography. When God formed the continent, O O J. 1/ he designated where every city on it should be located. Granted a population north and west of Manhattan sg^ 98 DAYLIGHT LAND. Island, and New York must be built. Populate New- England, and Boston is the inevitable result. The Lachine Rapids and an inhabited Canada necessitate Montreal. The prairies of the West must have a commercial centre, and hence Chicago. Now look at this site. These mountains, hills, even the islands in front of us, are fuU of precious ores, — iron, copper (and copper, too, free from sulphur), sUver, gold, nickel. Look at this harbor, fenced on aU sides from gales, deep, roomy, freed from ice each spring earHer than any other on the lake. Into it empties that river, the Keministiquia, yonder, up whose quiet channel a steamer with a draught of twenty-six feet can steam for four miles. Was there ever such natural wharfage given for commerce, made ready, so to speak, for the hand of man to use, as those eight miles of level river banks? Look at that elevator there. It holds one million, three hundred thousand bushels of wheat. Within sixty days two more of the same size wiH stand beside it. Four milHons of bushels accommodated where two years ago commerce had not laid down a single grain. How many elevators do you think, Judge, wiU be on that bank ten years from to-day? Last year those prairies to the west produced thirteen million bushels of wheat. This year they wiH yield twenty millions. Four years ago scientific men were disputing whether wheat would grow on that soU or not! The wheat area west of us is larger than the whole wheat area of the United States. The soU of this vast belt is virgin soU, rich, inexhaustible. I am talking from knowledge, gentlemen. I have been there THE CAPITALIST. 99 and looked into this thing, and I know that under decent cultivation every acre wiU yield forty bushels of finer quahty than the wheat of CaHfornia or Russia. How much wheat do you think will be raised in that vast wheat belt yonder twenty-five years hence ? And how is it to reach the markets of the world ? It must go south to the States, or it is coming here to Thunder Bay. These are the only two directions it can take in its exit. And so I say, and I 've backed my faith with my money, that here on this beautiful site wiU spring up one of the great cities of the continent." Mr. PeppereU's presentation of the subject was lis- tened to with the gravest attention by aU the group, in which, if the fact must be stated, there was more money seeking investment than is often found on any particular wharf. The Yankee can look up a long perspective with a good doUar at the other end of it, and this northwestern section of the continent is already attracting a deal of attention in the States, from shrewd, far-sighted men. "Mr. PeppereU," remarked the Judge, "my own judgment, based upon careful forecast, sustains your opinion fuUy. Illinois is a great State. It is larger in arable acres than England and Wales with their population of twenty-six mUHons. The State of Illinois can support twenty milHons of population easfly. But the productive area of this western Canada is ten times larger than the State of Illinois. Two hundred milHons of people can be supported, richly supported, north of the forty-ninth parallel. Five hundred nnles north of the international boundary you can sow wheat three 100 DAYLIGHT LAND. weeks earher than you can in Dakota. The climate is mflder in the vaUey of the Peace River than it is in Manitoba. These great facts of Nature are significant and impressive; none the less so because up to this time they have had Httle advertisement and are known to a comparative few. Yes, sir, you are right; there must be a great city here." " The fact is," resumed Mr. PeppereU, and he spoke with the enthusiasm which characterizes the American when speaking of his country, " the people of this continent have only just got started. On our side of the Hne we are sixty milHons, which are only the seed of the six hundred miHions that are to be. People talk a deal about the capacity of this continent to produce bushels and pounds, grain and meat. WJiy don't they figure on that higher problem, — the capacity to produce men ? Granted a good cHmate, a productive son, cheap fuel, absence of war, popularized knowledge, and the ennobling influences of Hberty, and what limit can you put to the development of such a people, not in resources alone but in numbers? Why should they not multiply and increase and possess the land ? Unless we go to cutting each other's throats, half the present population of the globe wiH be Hving on this continent within three hundred years." I Gad! " said the Judge, " I was born too early ! " "I have a friend," I remarked, "who predicts — and he is n't a Vennor either — that Chicago wiH ultimately have a population of fifteen millions-" II have n't a doubt of it," said one of the group, calmly. THE CAPITALIST. 101 " Eh ! What! " exclaimed the Judge, " how is it you are so positive ? " "It is a matter of knowledge," returned the man, " absolute knowledge." " Knowledge ! ': exclaimed the Judge, " how is that?" "The gentleman looked at the Judge contemplatively for a few moments, then said, "I was born there ! " " 0 Lord! " exclaimed the Judge, " where 's the train?" And breaking up with laughter we started for our car. No sooner were we on board the train and coUected in the smoking room — that most companionable spot for smokers on the earth — than the spirit of the group underwent a characteristic change. With one or two exceptions it happened that we represented the great progressive RepubHc and that large class of travelers, whose number is legion, that are to-day with lavish expenditures ransacking the globe — a class who go armed with more stories and more cash than the world ever had carried round it before. On the wharf Mr. PeppereU was the impersonation of business abiHty and foresight; sharp, incisive, edged Hke a razor, a man whose forecast was that of a statesman and whose language was that of a prince among financiers. With millions to invest, he had on the one hand a full sense of financial responsibiHty, and on the other, the courage of his judgment. For he had examined the field of his investments for himself, not trusting to the eyes or the words of another, and hence he knew the almost 102 DAYLIGHT LAND. boundless resources of the country and had full faith in its development. ' But once in the car he was no longer a financier, no longer the business man, no longer the speculator, but an American traveler, jovial, quaint, humorous, vivacious of speech, and loaded to the muzzle with anecdotes. "You would never suspect, gentlemen, perhaps," said Mr. PeppereU, as he took his cigar from his mouth and blew a dozen rings of blue smoke into the air; " you would never suspect that I was once busted —completely, overwhelmingly busted. In '48 I crossed the plains. I was young. I had an attack of the gold fever — had it bad. I made some money and got a good deal of experience. But on the whole, luck was against me. After ten years of knocking about, during which I was the rolling stone of the proverb, with hundreds of other old time Calif or- nians I started for the Fraser. My first experience in British Columbia was at American Bar. below the THE CAPITALIST. 103 Black Canon, and I shared that magnificent bit of luck with my countrymen. Pushing farther up into the country--after the Bar had played out—I struck one of the tributaries of the Thompson, pay gravel of the richest sort. I was alone and I decided to work it alone; I had a mule and a biUy goat that had foUowed me when the great camp 104 DAYLIGHT LAND. broke up at American Bar, a hap-hazard impulse on his part probably, for he was the forager of the camp and not a man claimed the least ownership in him. He had probably been lost and won more times at poker than any other bit of property on the face of the earth. Indeed, he was the universal resort of aU of us when bankrupted at that Hvely and fascinating game; for two reasons, — first, because he was no one's property, and second, his value was flexible; it had an elastic quality about it which accommodated the necessities of the man who had lost, and ministered to the amusement of the man who had won. The number of men whom that goat had started on the road to fortune wiH never be ascertained, and the multitude who, when they had recklessly gambled their last article of value away, with oaths or with laughter claimed one more deal on the strength of that goat as a personal chattel belonging exclusively to themselves, was probably equal to the census of the camp. He had become, therefore, both the inspiration and the consolation of us all; a piece of communal property of accommodating value, which every man, at one time or another, had contemplated with hope or with gratitude ; an object of universal sohcitude, and of which American Bar was justly proud. His temperament and his habits were such as belonged to his genus. If his animating principle was ever any other than curiosity, surely no one discovered it, and if he ever lost an opportunity to hit a man when a favorable one offered, it never was known. He f oUowed me as my mule ambled out of the camp as he might any other of the six hun- THE CAPITALIST. 105 dred men who were there, and attached himself to my fortunes with that whimsicalness of motive which is probably explainable only to the mind of a goat. His name was Percussion, a name which, with facetious appropriateness, had been given to him by a taU Ala- /A^ bamian one morning immedi- ately after a personal experience by which the name was suddenly suggested, and which caused the christening to be accompanied with considerable profanity. " I cannot say that my affections were greatly impressed because Percussion foUowed me out of the camp, nor did I feel the insinuations of flattery because he thus showed his partiaHty for my companionship; for I had indisputable evidence that in nature he was whoUy void of a conscience, and utterly unable to distinguish between friend and foe. Nor was I de- ceived by the apparent amiabiHty of his conduct, for during the time he was with me I never dropped my habit of watchfulness, or saw any evidence in the conduct of Percussion that would warrant my doing so. If the old reprobate ever dreamed of reform, the vision 106 DAYLIGHT LAND. of the night never affected in the least the habits of the day. " You can weU imagine," continued Mr. PeppereU, as he lighted a fresh cigar, " that I worked v (I the find for aU it was worth. By eking "S^Ij out my provisions with the help of the -3 trout in the stream, I managed to remain in the lonely spot for nearly a month, and I w\< Ai then, being absolutely without provisions, y I was driven to leave; I was the more willing to do so because, as nearly as I could estimate, I was in possession of fifty thousand dollars' worth of dust and nuggets. " The last evening I spent in the camp I devoted to arranging for transportation and to picturing the deHghts of the future. fvA*s%s&^ss* Percussion had not lacked entertain- £■ ;.W. 'I ! i • -r -I • ^*. 1// • ment, for while I was accumulating irfiiL,,, < wealth, he was actively engaged in collecting data for reminiscence. The white goats of the mountain, so rare south of the national Hne, were plentiful in the crags around my Aj^sr camp, and more than once had I been amused in contemplating a contest be- k. tween Percussion and some f ac-simile of nWH his of the hills: a contest which 1 ; im bound to say invariably terminated in favor of the champion of the camp. It was plainly a case in which civilized training had added to the prowess of nature, and steady practice with a variety of subjects made him master of his art. Y'sFSR.' ■*•>* : i v«-» ^er,*r* • "ON A CLIFF, STOOD PERCUSSION. THE CAPITALIST. 109 " I was up with the dawn on the morning set for my departure, and started at once for the Httle intervale a mUe or more distant, where my mule was grazing. I captured it without difficulty, and was in the act of mounting when I heard a noise as of a world rushing to ruin. The earth shook beneath my feet, and the mule trembled with terror. I knew what it meant. I sprang to his back, and spurred him recklessly up the trafl. I reached the brow of the decHvity that overlooked the gulch where I had labored. I need not describe what I saw. The face of the mountain to the west had disappeared, and in the place of a mighty forest was a broad tract of bare rock. The SHde had gone down through the o o gulch, and scoured it to the foundation ledges. The transformation was complete. Not a familiar object was left, save one. On a cliff fifty feet above the spot where my fortune had been found and lost stood Percussion, his tafl trembling with excitement and his horns lowered. It was the only opportunity of his Hfe that had passed I caUed to him to foUow me, but he refused to budge. Perhaps he thought another Slide would occur, or had a duel in mind for the morrow. Be that as it may, I left him to his reflections and his engagements, and Httle thinking that I should ever see O O 7 o him again, I reined my mule down the traU, an utterly despondent man." unimprov ed. 110 DAYLIGHT LAND. In spite of the fact that we were Hstening to the story of a misfortune that might well overwhelm with despair any person on whom it had f aUen, there was not a sober face in the crowd when Mr. PeppereU had brought us to that point of his narration which presented him to us in the most pitiable condition. The awful ruin which the savage SHde had wrought, Percussion on the cliff in the attitude of defiance, the trembling mule and the woe-begone rider thus bereft of his fortune in a minute, — aU these we saw as if painted in striking colors on a canvas. And yet, not a face in our group showed the least evidence that we felt ourselves in the presence of disaster. " I can see," said Mr. PeppereU, as he looked at our faces, " I can see, gentlemen, that you soberly realize the extent of my misfortunes, and appreciate the seriousness of my position. I was busted, I teU you, for I started down that trail without a doUar in my pocket or a crust in my saddle-bags. And yet fortune was nigh. For I had not gone a mile down the trafl when I came to a smaU camp in which I found not only needed refreshment but a speculation which brought to me the beginning of my fortune. " The party into whose camp I had thus fortunately stumbled was one of exploration in the interest of science, and was headed by a scientific man of extraordinary zeal, enormous vanity, vast pretensions, and devoid of common sense. " Now if there is one class of men I venerate more than others, it is the scientific class. It is true I am not given over much to veneration, for as it happens, THE PATH OF THE AVALANCHE. THE CAPITALIST. 113 by some arrangement for which I have never been able to feel myself responsible, in that section of my cranium where by rights there should be an eminence, is a kind of prairie flatness, — a dead level as it were. It is consoling to think that I am not answerable for this defect, and I have derived great satisfaction in my life by shuffling it off upon my ancestors, when at times conscience rebuked me at some breach of decorum, or most inappropriate burst of laughter. " I am happy to reflect that pre-natal influences are answerable for the major part of my weaknesses, and, as I devoutly hope, for the majority of my sins. I sincerely trust that they wiU be punished as they deserve. The more they catch it, the better my chances appear. I am ready to accept without reserve the harshest dogmas of theology so long as they have no appHcation to myself. " Nevertheless, in spite of this natural defect in my make-up, I have pecuhar feelings toward the average devotee of science. I recognize in bim a superior creation. He is the only being I have ever met whose mind seems able to work whoHy independent of facts. The faciHty with which he invents his needed theories fills me with admiration, and the audacity of his imagination in supplying himself with the necessary data for his conclusions is a source of pleasant surprise. It deHghts me to recaU that the most noted leaders of science were certain, a few centuries ago, that the globe was as flat as a shingle; that the whirHng earth on which we live had no motion ; that the sun, moon, and stars revolved around it as a centre and sum of the 114 DAYLIGHT LAND. great universe: that the blood in the human body stood O ** still; and that the worthy successors of these teachers of accurate knowledge, these men who supplant reHgion, and substitute knowledge for faith and reason for piety, are now convinced that all the superficial phenomena of the globe, including, of course, the five Great Lakes of this continent, are accounted for by the almost imperceptible and trivial movement of glaciers. Any class of men with such a record receive from me the same overwhelming deference which I involuntarily give to DeFoe, and the author of the * Arabian Nights.' I yield them the respect and admiration due the chief est romancers of the race. " I had no sooner reached his camp than the man of science approached me and made known his mission. It was to capture a specimen of the genuine Rocky Mountain Goat. " * I am anxious,' he explained, \ to obtain possession, in the interest of science, of a real Caper Horridus, in order that I may not only acquire indisputable knowledge of his anatomical structure, but fix beyond peradventure, — and upon this, sir, learned bodies have most differed, — what are his characteristic habits. If you can assist me to obtain a specimen, you wiH not only be a humble instrument of extending the boundaries of scientific research, but I will remunerate you with the sum which has been put at my disposal by the learned body of men whose president I am, namely, two hundred and fifty doH%rs in gold.' " I trust," explained Mr. PeppereU, humbly, " that Heaven has forgiven me for the dupHcity of my con- THE CAPITALIST. 115 duct at that juncture of my fortunes. It was a dreadful temptation. You can see, gentlemen, that it was. I was busted. The gentleman wanted a Caper AEorri- dus. I knew where he was. He was a genuine Caper, W$^$a^ that I knew, and as for the Horridus part, I felt I could safely leave it for the man of science to discover for himself. Had I reflected I might have acted with greater innocence. But as it was, without an instant's hesitation, I assured the man of science that I knew where there was a genuine Caper; a veritable Horridus of the crags, and that I could lead him directly to his habitat. But I distinctly declared I would have nothing to do with the capture of the terrible creature, and that I must be paid my money in advance. " The man of science was dehghted. He paid me the money without an instant's delay, fearing doubtless that I would withdraw my offer or Hft my price. He 116 DAYLIGHT LAND. assured me that he needed no assistance; that science had already ascertained that, whUe excessively curious, the Caper Horridus by nature was harmless, and that no hands but his own should make the capture, the fame of which would carry his name round the world. " You can see, gentlemen, that in the case of two persons animated by motives which inspired both of us, there was no reason for delay. I hitched my mule therefore in position to facUitate mounting, if, as I anticipated, I should return in a hurry, and with the man of science at my heels, proceeded directly up the trail, I did not J ~%. know exactly t '&\KA where I should find * .Je* my former compan- Kff^ t.li "L T 1 1$W lon> made no $g-|, doubt that the old reprobate was stiU near the path of the Land Slide, and that we should find him in a belligerent mood. And sure enough, we had not gone more than two thirds the distance, when looking care- f uUy over the top of a boulder, standing in an attitude of listening as if anticipating another SHde, there stood Percussion! " Now as you know, gentlemen, there is a good deal of l dynamite' in a biUy goat. It won't do to drop v/ . THE CAPITALIST. 117 on to one suddenly unless you wish to be lifted. Any man who runs against a goat suddenly without telegraphing him beforehand, acts as if his business education had been neglected. For a goat is the embodiment of a terrific energy when aroused, and nothing starts him quicker than a sudden appearance. Any man who approaches him without circumspection is liable to lose some part of himself, as it were. More than one man has lost his balance and his self-respect by such carelessness. Both these essentials of standing and character are apt to remain absent during the entire interview. " A goat is endowed with great quickness of apprehension and he acts on his impulses. When a goat of the masculine gender stands and gazes at you with a O O */ look of curious deHberation in his eyes, you wiH, if you are a rational being, promptly pick the nearest tree and get behind it. This is the only wise course to adopt. Nor should you be slow in doing this. It is not safe to take any chances with a biUy goat if he is within fifty feet of you and has in his own mind decided to act. You cannot rely on his remaining where he is any considerable length of time. He is apt to move suddenly, and when he moves he always moves in a straight Hne, and with his objective point clearly in view. I To know a goat thoroughly, gentlemen, I am convinced that a man should begin his investigations in chfldhood. The knowledge needed is not acquired reacHly by an adult. A man can pUot a steamboat better than a boy, but to steer a goat successfuUy into a 118 DAYLIGHT LAND. paddock without any back action of the paddles is a feat at which a boy wiU beat his father every time. The innocent sprighthness of early life is an essential element of success in such an undertaking. A deacon of mature age and dignity of character might do it, but he would never be fit to hold his office after he had finished the job. His record would be broken, as it were. What he had gained in fluency of expression he would have lost in resignation of spirit and the sweet placidness of his vocabulary. A deacon should always leave the management of a biHy goat to his hired boy, and keep out of hearing when the boy and the goat are in close communication, too. Any material departure from this rule wiH always result in un- happiness. The manners of the goat wiU be spofled, and the deacon — if the matter be fuUy reported — wiU surely lose his office. " A goat is like any other highly organized creation. He learns evil fast and forgets it slowly. He is a creature of vanity, and reHshes success. After he has learned a man's anatomy by experiment, the knowledge is fixed in his mind forever. Time may obHterate the impression he has made on you, but it never obhterates the impression you have made on him. Years may pass; your hairs may be whiter and his coarser, but if he ever gets a chance to hit you again, your years and venerable appearance will not save you. The old reprobate wiH hit you in the same spot. I have never been able to satisf actorily explain this to my own mind, but the fact remains. I have seen it demonstrated. " Yes, there stood Percussion. I ducked my head THE CAPITALIST. 119 and beckoned to the man of science. He bounded to my side, and shaking with excitement, peered over the bowlder at him. "' A Caper Horridus !' he gasped. • A genuine Caper! A true Horridus!' he exclaimed hoarsely. * Pedes, nigri 1 corni, circuli ; caput, comutus 1 genus, hirsutus; habitus, agilis; homino amicus.' And fumbhng in his pocket for his note-book, he dashed around the bowlder and started for Percussion. " I cannot describe what foUowed. Percussion was at his best or his worst that morning. He had missed one great opportunity, and was in no mood to be trifled with. He struck the man of science at the precise spot selected in his own mind, and with the force of a catapult. He bowled him past the point of rock behind which I was crouched as if he had been a pack- basket. His impetus brought him within sight and he came at me as if I was a land shde. " ' You miserable cuss,' I exclaimed, ■ don't you know your benefactor ?' And I went up a tree. I yeUed to the man of science to Hght out. He recovered his breath and his legs at the same time and rico- chetted down the traU as if fired out of a columbiad, yeUing, j Caper Horridus !' ' Caper Horridus !' at every jump. " After him bounded Percussion. Without an instant of hesitation I foUowed. I had a longing to get on to my mule. The man of science reached the edge of the camp and feU flat, and Percussion struck a Chinook Indian in a way to increase his vocabulary. The last jump I made carried me to the back of my 120 DAYLIGHT LAND. mule, and I tore down the trafl with my heels in her flanks. I reached the banks of the Thompson and went in at a jump. Half across the flood I heard a fusflade and I knew that Percussion had at last struck a land sHde." " Rat Portage, gentlemen ! " called the conductor. I Twenty minutes to see the Lake of the Woods and the great flour miU at Kewatin ! " "msa -zrrr&pi* f. *a«*«aa;.-.v fTr. r-;^—^., :v:i ■<-_ *H? CHAPTER VII. A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. " Nature's prime favorites we the Pelicans, High-fed, long-lived, sociable and free." EAVENS ! " exclaimed Mr. PeppereU.. " Judge, look at those prairie chickens! " We had stepped from the cars at Winnipeg, and as we struck the platform we found ourselves in front of a heap of grouse, — a hundred in number, it maybe, — big, fat birds such as make man thankful he was born with a stomach. The Judge looked at the birds. There was a wistful look in his eyes. His Hps moved as if the> gamey flavor were already in his mouth. He rolled, his eyes toward me longingly, and queried, — 1 Where did those birds come from ? " r 122 DAYLIGHT LAND. " From Southern Manitoba," I answered promptly. I They are as thick as grasshoppers there." The Man from New Hampshire had been fumbling at the birds, as if examining their condition, and when he lifted one, lo ! there was a tag tied to its foot, and on the tag was penciled, " Colonel Goffe, New Hampshire." " One of my birds, by gosh ! " said the Colonel. "Clean from your farm, eh, Colonel?" exclaimed Mr. PeppereU. I Certainly," returned the Colonel; " flew straight to this platform and dropped dead. Knew I was to be here. I 'U eat him to-night," and he passed the bird in under his arm between his coat and his vest. " My conscience ! My conscience ! " groaned the Judge, as if wrestling with an internal enemy. " The gods have burdened me with a conscience." | My bird ! My bird ! " returned the New Hampshire man, groaning in imitation of the Judge. " The gods have burdened me with a bird," and he started for the car. " HaUoo, old boy!" screamed a voice, and a flat hand smote me on the back. " Do you remember the turkeys in Texas ? " I Yes," I answered, as I wheeled, " and that the best snap shot in the New York Gun Club, Jack Osgood by name, could n't hit a turkey gobbler at fifty feet as he went through the Hve oaks." And we shook hands, laughed, and roared, as two sportsmen will when they suddenly meet, with years between them and some ludicrous happening. A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 123 "Jack Osgood, — Judge Doe, — Mr. PeppereU," I said, briefly introducing them. " We shot turke together in Texas," I added. " He shot them, and I shot at them," rephed Jack. "I never shaU forget how I felt when the first gobbler got O O up ahead of my gun. I shook tiU my bones rattled ; it took me two days to sober down and get steady." "Did you shoot those birds there, Mr. Osgood ? " asked the Judge. O O " Certainly; every one of them, sir," answered Jack. " I dropped them for four bags. There are ninety-seven aU told. If you want any, help yourselves, gentlemen. You wiU find them good broUers." I Heaven has not forsaken me ! " exclaimed the Judge, as he fingered the breast of a chicken, and liking the one he had so weU, he took another. " I 'm not mean enough to look a gift horse in the mouth, Judge," said Mr. PeppereU, and he carelessly picked up three chickens. " Where are you going, Jack ? " I queried. " I am going to Rush Lake, after canvas-backs," re- O O a pHed Osgood. " What did you say, Mr. Osgood ? " exclaimed the Judge. " What was the name you arave to the duck gave is I Canvas-backs, sir," answered Jack. 124 DAYLIGHT LAND. " Gentlemen," exclaimed the Judge, " I don't know how you feel, but I 'm tired of traveling. This steady rolling shakes up a man of my age terribly. If Mr. Osgood wiU permit, I wiU go to Rush Lake with him. I feel that my system requires several days of absolute rest." i I dare not leave you to go alone, Judge," cried the Man from New Hampshire, who was leaning from the platform of the car, listening to what the Judge said. " Your conscience ! think of your conscience. Where did you get those two chickens ? \ and he glared at the Judge enviously. And so it was arranged that we should aU drop off at Rush Lake, and have a few days with the canvas- backs and the white peHcans, and we started out under the guidance of Osgood to get together our suppHes. " Ten years ago," remarked Mr. PeppereU, " there vwere not a hundred white people here. At the forks of the river was Old Fort Garry, a Hudson Bay Company's post, and that was aU. To-day there is a city solidly buflt of brick and stone, with a population of thirty thousand. It is necessary to see such changes with our eyes to appreciate them." "It looks to me as if it had a future," said the Judg< a great future." I Decidedly," answered Mr. PeppereU. " This is to be the Prairie City, as Vancouver is to be the Coast City of the country. The one wiH be built up by the inland trade ; the other by its foreign commerce." "Winnipeg wiU have rivals to the west, Mr. PeppereU, and don't you forget it in your figuring," observed the Man from New Hampshire. <o c > I o 33 A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 127 " I don't forget it," returned Mr. PeppereU, promptly. " I have counted on it. But Winnipeg has the start, a good strong start, over every rival to the west or east. Her thoroughfares are constructed ; her system of Hghting in operation; her water-works provided ; her pubhc buildings erected; her wholesale and retaU houses estabUshed, and her trade connections with the East and the South made, Colonel Goffe. A financier knows the value of such a start. Winnipeg has got her grip on the country round about her, and it wiH take an earthquake or a cyclone to loosen it." And so, Hke active-minded Americans, whfle buying our suppHes and getting together our outfit for the camp at Rush Lake, we talked of the future of Winnipeg and figured on its changes. If there are prettier bits of water anywhere than can be found in these Western prairies, they have not been discovered. A few are alkaline, but many are fresh, and the prairies roU down in billows of grass to their beaches or flatten to the water through acres of sedge. Rush Lake is weU named, and yet it is not swampy nor sluggish; for mUes of its shore line are embanked, and its waters are Hvely. From these banks the prairie roUs away in waves of fine verdure, and the eye sweeps unimpeded to the rim of the horizon. Our tent was pitched on a bank which brought the lake in full view, and over it the air moved in cool, easy currents. It was an ideal camp for a sportsman, for the free water was speckled with ducks, and the vast reedy spaces were aHve with their movements. Canvas-backs, maUards, teal, black ducks, wood 128 DAYLIGHT LAND. ducks, curlew, the big plover, and those wonders of the western land, the huge snow-white peHcans, whose wings have the stretch of a white-headed eagle's, and which float on the water with the slow, stately movement of swans, — aU were here, and in numbers beyond counting. On the prairie were coyotes, gray wolves, and antelopes. What more could a sportsman desire than such a camp and such game? I Heavens ! " cried the Judge, " was there ever such music ? " and he tumbled off his cot. | A chorus for the saints," rephed the New Hampshire man, as he emerged from the folds of a buffalo robe in which he had bestowed himself near the tent- pins ; and in less than a minute we were all standing outside of the tent completing our toilet, the Judge with one boot in his hand, and Mr. PeppereU discreetly wrapped in a blanket. What a morning ! The sun had not yet risen. One great star, a globe of Hquid luminance, hung in the eastern sky. Along the horizon's edge ran a line of rose. Above it were the shifting splendors of an oriental ruby. The western heavens were stiH blue black. The prairie grasses were wet with dew, and every drooping point sparkled Hke a gem. The air was motionless, and the lake from shore to shore was blanketed with white fleece. And out of this fleece, what noises came ! [The flutter of plumes ; the spatter of playful ducks ; the pipe of curlew and plover ; the whiz of passing wings; the voice of pehcan; the honk of geese; the low soft sound of feathery Hfe, seeking, feeding, greeting, filled aU the air with murmurous musical sounds. A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 129 I Oh, the glory of the world ! — the glory of the world! I cried the Judge, as he gazed at the beauty and breathed the pure air in. " Oh, the glory of the ducks ! — the glory of the ducks ! |! said the Man from New Hampshire, as he listened to the sounds in the fog and thought of the O O broUed grouse that he ate for his supper. " Osgood," I said, " did a sportsman ever hear sweeter music ? " " Never," he responded, " unless it was the gobble of a wUd turkey as he strutted in front of his harem in some Httle glade among the cedar groves of the Guadaloupe;" " Is that coffee I smeU ?" queried Mr. PeppereU, suddenly. " It is, by the powers ! " exclaimed the Judge, and he dove through the door of the tent to complete his toflet. " That Judge of ours," said the Man from New Hampshire, pointing to the door of the tent as he disappeared, — " that Judge of ours is a good deal of a poet, but he has a weU-balanced mind notwithstanding." " Cook," caUed the Judge, as he thrust his head out of the tent in the direction of the kitchen. " Cook, how soon wiH breakfast be ready ? " "In a few minits, Marse Judge, in a few minits," responded the darkey. " JuHus Caesar Bismarck ! " thundered the Judge. " At what hour, I say, wiU you have breakfast ready ? " " Fo' de Lawd, Marse Judge," promptly rephed the ebony cross between ancient and modern greatness, 'ff. how d' you s'pose dis nigger knows ? " 130 DAYLIGHT LAND. us voice " Oh Lord ! 1 groaned the Judge, and sounded as if it came from an empty ceUar. " Why do you move so carefully ? " asked Mr. PeppereU of the New Hampshire man, as ready for breakfast we went out of the tent. " Sh ! " returned the Man from New Hampshire. " If I don't move carefuHy the Judge wiH hear me rattle." With the dawn the lake shore near us had been em- belHshed with a most romantic arrival. A tribe of the Blackfeet Nation had come in from the plains and gone into camp. Twenty-six large, fine-looking Tepees were stretched in a row to the east and north of our tent, and some hundred and fifty Indian men, women, and chUdren were grouped round their camp- kettles or moving about at their work. Here and there stood knots of men picturesquely draped in their blankets of high colors. These Indians were not vaga- o o bonds, nor sots; they were not bloated with Hquor, nor broken down with disease; they were not dirty or repulsive to the eye ; they were fine, healthy-looking people. The men were taU and weU formed, the boys sprightly in their motions. The squaws did not look like drudges or human beasts of burden, but like women of bronze skin, Hving the Hfe and doing the work of aboriginals; they were aU comfortably clothed, and some of the girls were finely formed and unmistakably handsome. There was not a half-breed among them. It was a camp of full-blooded Indians of the plains. " Gentlemen," said the Judge, " if I ever lose my appetite I shaU come to Rush Lake." > I > m d !| Hi *l A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 133 " If Canada ever loses Rush Lake, then," retorted the Man from New Hampshire, " I shaU know where to look for it;" and he measured with his eye the front elevation of the Judge. " Gentlemen," exclaimed the Judge, ignoring the remark of the New Hampshire man, " I wish it understood that this is a camp of sportsmen, and not pothunters. We are not here to make money, but to spend it; not to supply the market, but ourselves with game, and therefore I move that we act Hke true sportsmen, and fix the size of our bags each day by mutual agreement. Friends should be remembered," continued the Judge, " and I suggest that each man be permitted to kill a certain number of ducks for himself, and a certain number to send to his friends." " I move," suggested Mr. PeppereU, " that every man be permitted to shoot twelve ducks and two pelicans during the week for himself." " What about plover and curlew ? " queried Osgood. "They don't count," decided the Judge. "You can bag aU you can." 1 Don't count!': exclaimed the Man from New Hampshire. " That decision would n't stand a minute in the highest court. I know a man in Texas who started in to eat fifty-six curlew, and when he got to the forty-second he dropped " — I Stop right there, sir," said the Judge, shaking his finger at the Colonel. " Stop right there ! The court hasn't forgotten your story of the Japanese screen. The number being settled that each man may shoot for himself, it only remains for us to decide how many he may be aUowed to shoot for his friends." 134 DAYLIGHT LAND. 11 would like to shoot a dozen a day for my friends," said Mr. PeppereU. " The station is n't a mUe away, and we can start them east every evening." " That wiH do for me," added Osgood, cheerfully. I If it gets a Httle dull, I 'U try my hand at the antelopes and the wolves." 11 'm not a shot-gun man, and wUl Hve on your bounty," I remarked. " If you 'U give my Winchester a pehcan each day, and fuU swing at the wolves and coyotes, I shaU have a royal time." I WeU, sir," queried the Judge of the Colonel, I how many do you want for your friends ? " " I have n't an enemy in the State," said the Man from New Hampshire, " and by the last census " — I Colonel Goffe!" interrupted the Judge, sternly, " the court.wiH not be trifled with. How many do you want for your friends ? " I WeU, as I was saying," said the Colonel, " I have n't an enemy in the State of New Hampshire, and the last census fixed the population at three hundred and fifty thousand. Of this number only seventy thousand are voters. I would n't give a duck to a Democrat if I died for it, so we can chalk off " — I Colonel Goffe," thundered the Judge, " the court does not propose to sit on this camp-stool aU day, and if you don't come down " — I Oh, very weU, very weU," cried the Colonel, " it is not good poHtics to leave out New Hampshire in any close election, but let her go. Outside of New Hampshire I've only one friend. 1 picked him up this morning; he 's herding the Indian ponies out there, A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 135 and he looked to me as if he had n't had duck for some time, and that he would prove mighty elastic when he got duck " — " Gentlemen," exclaimed the Judge, interrupting the Colonel, " our friend from New Hampshire has suggested a most amiable settlement of the question. We wiH abide by our ruling, and the Colonel shaU be free to shoot as many ducks as he can for the Indians." And with this decision we all arose, weU pleased, and went for our guns. Now the Man from New Hampshire was a wag, dry as seasoned hickory. Luck invariably assists such a man when bent on a joke, and luck had assisted this gray-headed joker to such an armament as many readers of this book, I am sure, never saw. In a gun- shop at Winnipeg, he had found an old-fashioned flintlock, known among our forefathers as a king's arm. It was of monstrous bore, thick at the breech and thin at the muzzle; with a strong stock mounted heavfly in solid brass, and an O ** iron ramrod. The flint was half the size of a smaU fire shovel, while the pan was as large as an iron spoon. 136 DAYLIGHT LAND. It was a venerable reHc of former days and men; a murderous old gun, if you had shot and powder enough to charge it properly, and you could ever get it off; but most eccentric and unrehable in its habits. The gun was apparently strong as ever, and as to its barrel, in good repair, but the lock was lashed to its place by stout leather thongs, and unless the powder was coarse, the grains would leak through between the barrel and the pan into the recess where the springs and tumbler were located. The spectacle which the Colonel presented when he stood equipped for the day, — a big powder horn with a wooden stopple under his elbow, one pocket sagging with shot, the other stuffed full of oakum and paper for his wadding, the old gun in his hand, and a white beU-crowned hat on his head, which he had found by the same luck that got him his gun, was of so funny a sort that the camp roared with laughter. But the Colonel took the jokes that we fired at him with imperturbable gravity, and we knew that if ever he did get that old gun off, and there were any ducks in the landscape within range, the Indian encampment would be fed fuU to feasting. In less than an hour each of us had his bag except the Colonel. " For some unexplainable reason," as he stated, he had been " unable to get the old thing off." J o o But he assured us he had confidence in his piece, and that sooner or later the world would hear from him. There was not one of us that did not admire both his courage and perseverance, for he stood bravely up behind the old mortar and puUed the trigger at every duck that came by. A JOLLY CAMP AT RUSH LAKE. 137 " Lord ! " said the Judge, " what would become of the Colonel if the old thing should go off ? " So we patiently traUed in the rear of his canoe in response to the Colonel's exhortation, " to stand by the institution of the fathers." Advice and interrogations were rained upon him. The Judge wanted to know "if he had loaded every time he snapped, and if he knew how many charges there were in the piece ? " Mr. PeppereU inquired " if he had powder enough to keep on priming for the rest of the day ? " And Osgood suggested that we each " take our turn and speU him at puUing the trigger." MeanwhUe, as we had stopped shooting, the ducks had settled thicker and thicker, till the water was black and the sedge was full of feathers, and the Colonel worked away at the ancient bit of machinery with redoubled vigor. He who says that the age of miracles o */ o has passed is an idiot, for that old gun finaUy went off — went off at an opportune moment too, for the canoe was wedged into the sedge, the Colonel weU braced, and the air filled with ducks. Granted the air black with birds; an old king's arm charged with a giU or more of coarse shot, and a man from New Hampshire squinting grimly over the breech-pin, and there could be but one result, or rather three results. The gun jumped out of his hands, the Colonel sat down in the boat with a crash, and ducks feU by the dozen. It was a monstrous bag in truth, and the Colonel took the honors of the day and week, for whUe he averaged less than five shots a day, still the totals beat every gun in the crowd. One thing is sure, the Indians who 138 DAYLIGHT LAND. camped with us on Rush Lake that week wiH never forget that old flintlock gun or the Man from New Hampshire, nor shaU we who were there ever forget the sport and the fun. nk CHAPTER VIII. BIG GAME. HAVE hunted every kind of game between the Southern Gulf and Great Slave Lake," rephed Mr. Osgood, in answer to an interrogation from Colo- nei Goffe, as we were sitting, one evening, in front of our tent at Rush Lake, |* and I can give you as much or as Httle information as you wish on the subject of big or Httle game, bird or beast. Twenty years ago the big game of the continent could be found north or south of the international line, and even ten years back good hunting could be had in several of our States and Territories, but to-day he who wishes to find game of the larger sort, 140 DAYLIGHT LAND. many kinds and plenty of it, must come over on this side of the Hne and hunt northward." I What do you mean by northward, Jack ? " I asked. I How far north have you hunted ? " 1 Six hundred miles at least, perhaps eight," he answered. " Last summer I started from Calgary with a comrade, and fetched a traU on horseback weU down into the great Mackenzie Basin. The Mackenzie, you know, is a mighty river, bigger than the Mississippi, they say, and the country it drains is an empire in itself." I That is a long way to go for a hunt, Jack," I said, interrupting him. " You and I traUed farther than that south and west," he retorted pleasantly. " But you must remember, gentlemen, that from the hour you leave Cal- WHITE TAIL DEER. mil BIG GAME. 14a gary you are in good sporting country. We hugged the foot-hills from tho start, and we had bighorn, goats, ' O 7 O 7' bear, antelopes, and wolves with which to amuse ourselves. Then you must remember that we were in the saddle, and traiHng through a most lovely country, without weariness and at no burdensome expense, pushing up into a strange region known only to the Indians and the Hudson Bay Post folk, through an atmosphere pure and bracing as men ever rode in. I assure you that had I not fired my rifle from beginning to end of it, that two months' traU would have been most enjoyable." " What is the character of the soU and climate in this North Land of yours, Mr. Osgood ? " queried the Judge. " The sofl is as rich as any on the continent," answered Jack, "and the chmate simply perfect. It is mflder than it is here, or even in Dakota or Minnesota. Wheat can be sown earher — three weeks earher, I should think — than at the national Hne. The days are longer, and the cereal growths get the benefit of the prolonged solar Hght; a great benefit, I can assure you, it is in bringing a crop along fast. At the northern part of my traU I could read a newspaper at midnight without the aid of candle or moon. It is Daylight Land up there, and so it might, in truth as weU as in poetry, be called." That is a beautiful name," cried the Judge enthu- siasticaUy. " A beautiful name ! Dayhght Land ! That is n't much Hke the popular conception of Canada, which pictures it as the home of Ice and of Night. I 144 DAYLIGHT LAND. verUy believe that half the world thinks of Canada as a cold, desolate country the year round." 1 The world knows nothing about Canada as a whole," Jack rephed warmly. " Nor do Canadians in general know anything of their own country. They are not travellers, as we Yankees are. The old French stock were great wanderers and explorers, but their descendants are stay-at-homes. The old-time French Canadians went everywhere. The grandsire was a voyageur; his descendants to-day are only habitans. He fed his sinews on the game of the whole continent. These eat pease and garlic at home. The fact is Canada knows less of herself than she did a century and a half ago. She is absolutely engaged in rediscovering her own geography. The same thing is happening BIG GAME. 145 in Canada, touching her great rivers, lakes, and fertile plains, as happened in Italy in respect to Pompeii and Herculaneum. They are being uncovered and brought to the Hght. They have lain buried under a huge deposit of ignorance, and are now being exhumed. There are a dozen American sportsmen I could mention who know more about Canada than the Geographical Department at Ottawa." " Why, Jack," I exclaimed, " you are quite an orator. The Canadian government ought to put you on a salary to write then advertising Hterature and make immigration speeches." "You can laugh as much as you Hke," returned Jack with good-natured earnestness, " but you know I am right, for you know as much of this great country as I do, and perhaps more. I wish our countrymen would learn the facts about this huge empire of opportunity to the north of them, or that the Canadians had knowledge of it themselves, faith in it, and the right connections with us. Then you would see this western land jump to the front of continental observation." " I don't see where the immigration is to be found to people this vast country," said Colonel Goffe. " The United States have thus far preempted the immigration possibUities of the world, and stand intermediate between the great western movement of population which signalizes our age, and this country, and I can't O O ' ** see how this Canada of the west and northwest is ever to be peopled. A goodly number of EngHsh and Scotch are already here, but it will take many years of such slow additions to people these vast areas which stretch west and north from this spot." 146 DAYLIGHT LAND. " The people to populate this country," said Jack, " are coming from Great Britain, the north of Europe, and perhaps from the States. Americans as weU as Europeans should possess this land. This country is agricultural, and in a few years a great agricultural movement from the States northward is likely to take place. Our tent is pitched at the centre of the wheat area of the continent. Five hundred mUes to the north and as far to the south from where we sit, and a thousand nnles east and west, measure what I caU the great wheat square of the continent. Here is pure water, a perfect cHmate, cheap fuel, and a soU that produces forty bushels of prime wheat to the acre. As the soU to the south under our siUy system of agriculture becomes exhausted, as it soon wiU be, and the average yield per acre shrinks more and more, the wheat grow- BIG GAME. 147 ers must and wiH move northward. This movement is sure to come. It is one of the fixed facts of the future ; it is born of an agricultural necessity, and when it begins to move it wiH move in with a rush. A mUHon of American wheat farmers ought to be in this country inside of ten years, and I believe that within that time population wiH pour in and spread over these Canadian plains like a tide." "Jack Osgood," I exclaimed, "you are the same sanguine theorist that you were eight years ago. You came to Texas to shoot turkeys for a month, and before half the month had passed you bought twenty thousand acres of land." " So I did," he rejoined, " and I beg you to remember that I paid one doUar and twenty-five cents per acre, and that I sold out last year, as you know, for eight doUars and fifty cents per acre. It pays to be a theorist in an age and country Hke this." " Mr. Osgood," said the Man from New Hampshire, "I am convinced that you and I are adapted to do business as partners. If you can select twenty thousand acres anywhere around here that look as those twenty thousand you bought in Texas did, I wiU go halves with you, and we wiH stake out a city near the centre of the section at once." I Come, come," I said when the laughter had subsided, I have done with this enthusiastic forecast and your speculative talk, and teU me about the big game, as you promised to do at the start. How far north did you go, Jack, and what did you find in the way of game ? O 148 DAYLIGHT LAND. " I went as far as the Great Slave Lake. The shores of this lake are the favorite haunt of the musk ox, and I wanted to get some of the strange-looking creatures. You can find them on all the upper tributaries of the Mackenzie River. A musk ox is a sizable game, for the males weigh four or five hundred pounds, and the ^W™ females nearly as much. They are about eight feet long and four high, and have a dark amber-colored coat. In the faU of the year they grow a very fine wool. They have a flat frontal, and the horns, which are very large at the base, grow out of the top of the skull close to each other, and curve downward on either side of the head, but turn sharply upward some six inches from the ends, and are finely pointed. They seem to me to resemble a sheep more than an ox, but they do PRONG HORN ANTELOPE. Dps BIG GAME. 151 not have the cry of a sheep or goat, but make a noise like to the snort of a walrus. They signal danger by stamping like a buck, or by striking then horns against the horns of others standing near. They are courageous, and fight savagely. Even bears are kiHed by them. The calf is a feeble thing, and can't foUow the mother for a month or more after birth. The mothers hide their calves very cunningly, and protect them with the utmost affection. They feed on grasses, mosses, and browse, and then* flesh tastes very like moose-meat or venison, only it is of a coarser grain. They are shy, and keep sentinels weU out from the herd when feeding, and hence it is good sport to stalk them. I spent a week hunting them, and had good success; but I had more enjoyment in watching them and studying their habits than in kiUing them, for after I had coUected a few specimen skins I had no motive to kill farther." " That's right," said the Judge. " Boys are murderous chaps with the gun, but when a man has shot a few years he begins to shoot less and study more, and finds more pleasure in learning than in killing. A true sportsman becomes, as he grows in years and skill, more and more a naturahst, and receives more pleasure from the Hving knowledge he acquires than the dead game he bags." "The caribou are very plenty in the north," resumed Jack. " There are two varieties, the woodland and the barren-ground caribou. They are found in large herds around Athabaska Lake and southward of Hudson's Bay to Lake Superior. I need not describe 152 DAYLIGHT LAND. them to you, for you have aU, doubtless, seen them. In summer they come from the far north, and feed around James's Bay. The caribou are good game, for it takes skiH, patience, and physical endurance to stalk one successfully. When he finds himself hunted, he travels with a low head, his antlers well back, and f f keeps his body close to the ground. I followed one on the Nelson River four days before I captured him, and he came near bagging me instead of I him, for I only wounded him, and he charged at me like an elephant. The barren-ground caribou is not much known, I fancy, among the sportsmen of the States. They are much smaUer than the woodland species, weighing only about one hundred pounds when dressed. They are very plenty in the Great Slave and Athabaska Lake region. Small as they are, their antlers are much larger than mHH BIG GAME. 153 those of the larger species. They have more branches on them, and are far handsomer. In summer they are a reddish brown, but in winter almost snow white. The skin tans finely, becoming very soft and white, and is used for tents and garments. Their flesh is exceUent, and the fat on the rump is highly prized as a great dehcacy by the Indians and French voyageurs. It is not difficult to stalk them, as they are not shy as is the larger kind, and hence it is not much sport to hunt them. I have seen a hundred or more in a herd." " Are the buffalo actuaUy gone, Mr. Osgood ?" queried the Judge. "I saw three within fifty mnes of Calgary, last year," Jack answered. " I did not kill them, of course. I dare say they have been killed since. I have a feeling that a few might yet be found by searching among the foot-hiUs northwest of us, and I saw a Hving traU last summer in the Peace River country, but the buffalo of the plains is practically an extinct animal. There is a family or tribe of buffalo, known as the wood buffalo, to the north of us, however." " I never heard of them before," remarked Mr. PeppereU. "Very likely," said Jack. "I never did untU I heard of them from the Indians north of Edmonton last year. There are not more than a thousand aU told, perhaps, but they are noble animals, and the sportsman that captures one has a trophy of which he may weU be proud. The wood buffalo is much larger and handsomer than his brother of the plains. His 154 DAYLIGHT LAND. hair is finer, and his great size makes him a nobler object to look at. He Hves whoUy in the forest, and is very wUd and hard to get at. But a real sportsman would gladly ride a thousand miles to get a good shot at one. I have two skins at home, and I prize them as trophies of the chase beyond any others that twenty years of hunting aU over the continent have given me. a is, V lllf«( | Are there many Rocky Mountain goats in this Canadian country ? " I asked. I Plenty of them everywhere in the mountains," he answered. " South of the national line they are not very plenty, but as you travel northward they become more and more numerous. You will, I presume, see them from the car window as you ride along, once you get into the mountain section to the west of us. I see they have been represented as very shy and difficult to f*S*WB*WU BIG GAME. 155 stalk, by a prominent sportsman of the States. I have not found this to be the case after I had studied their habits and character a Httle. The first thing- to remember in stalking a white goat is that he is by nature a most curious animal. His bump of inquisi- tiveness is excessively large. You must not attempt to stalk him too much. You must let him stalk you. If you move he wiU see you, and away he goes at a bound; but if you don't move, but remain hidden and expose something to his sight that he does not understand, and exercise patience, it is ten to one that in half an hour you have drawn him within range. In- v O deed, the true rule in any form of hunting is to move very Httle and very slowly, or not at all. The adage that ' luck comes to the man who won't go after it,' is O 7 especiaUy verified in stalking. I have lolled more game by sitting stiH than by tramping or riding after it." " In the second place I made a very interesting discovery, and I made it by accident, one day. I was stalking a fine old biUy goat in the mountains north of Bow River with a comrade, a green man, who did n't seem to have an eye in his head. The game was above me, half a mUe away, perhaps, and I was moving up with the utmost circumspection, when to my dismay I saw my comrade suddenly emerge from the scrub five hundred feet above the old feUow, and walk carelessly along in full view. I was not surprised that my friend did not see the goat, for I doubt if he would have seen an elephant twenty rods in front of him, but I was surprised that the goat did n't see him, for he 156 DAYLIGHT LAND. was a foxy old chap, and kept his eyes open. And then it was that I suddenly made a discovery, — a discovery which made goat-stalking easy to me after that, — which was that a goat never expects danger from above, but always from below, and that to stalk a mountain where goats are, successfully, the stalker should work downward from the top, and not upward from the base. I It is just the same with big horn sheep, as they are caUed. They should be stalked from above. They have a wide range, for I have shot them in Southern California and in the Great Bear Lake region. They are not confined to the mountains, as is generaUy supposed. I have found them in flat country, and thick too. They live in Sonora, in tracts absolutely arid; at least I never could find any water there. A ram weighs, when fully grown and weU conditioned, about three hundred and fifty pounds. They grow a very fine wool in winter, and the females have horns Hke a common goat. The old idea that they aHght on their big horns when compeUed to jump from a cliff is aU nonsense. It is like the popular behef that prairie dogs, owls, and rattlesnakes live in one burrow harmoniously. There is no such \ happy famfly' arrangement among them, I can assure you. The snakes eat the eggs of the owls, the owls eat the snakes, and the prairie dogs eat the owl chicks at every opportunity. A good many men with big-sounding titles would be much better naturahsts if they would become practical sportsmen and traUers for a few years." " That's my idea, Mr. Osgood," said the Judge, ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP. BIG GAME. 159 with strong emphasis. " If I had a boy and I wanted to make a true naturaHst of him, I would buy bim a sportsman's outfit and give him to you for five years to educate." "WeU, I could teach him a good many valuable things, I don't doubt, or any other true sportsman could who has traUed the continent as widely as I have," Jack responded. " For he would see not only its physical geography and its old races, now almost extinct, but aU its vegetable and arboreal growths, and above aU learn how to use his eyes and his ears and his reasoning faculties more sharply and caref uUy than he could in the recitation room of a coUege. Mr. Murray and I were graduated from Yale, and we remember our Alma Mater with scholarly gratitude, but the Great University of Men and Things, as represented by our studentship of the continent, has given us a more valuable knowledge 7 O O than our study of books ever did." | Never mind that now, Jack," I said ; " you and I can't graduate from the big Outdoor University until O O «/ we have saddled across the Mackenzie Basin and boated down its current a thousand nnles, or two thousand, for that matter." " I wiH do that with you any summer," he said. I Three months will be aU the time we need, and from the day we leave Calgary tiU our return we shaH be in the best hunting region of the continent — the section o o where big game in abundance and aU its varieties, ex- O O cepting the plain buffalo, can now be found. All through this area north of us the wapiti, or big elk, are found plentifully, both among the foot-hills and in 160 DAYLIGHT LAND. the woody clumps and timber which patch the plains of the country here and there. The wapiti are noble game, and the stalking of them a most manly recrea- -O 7 O v tion. As to grizzHes, I never hunt them. I do not admit that a sportsman has such a motive in his sporting adventures as to justify him in risking his Hfe, as he must do in stalking for grizzHes. Mr. Murray saw me run from a grizzly once, and I am confident that he never saw a man of my inches make better time. I have killed two, but in both instances I was so placed that I could n't run, and had to kill or get killed, so I stood stoutly in for the chances, and won. There are two animals I never seek, and always shun if I can : the grizzly bear and the panther. The latter is the king of the American forest and mountains. He is the only beast the grizzly fears. The Hthe cat is more than a match for the monstrous bear. The Indians wiH teU you that they have found many grizzHes that were certainly killed by panthers, but no one has ever seen the body of a panther that was kiUed by a grizzly or any other animal. The panther is king of the woods. " Moose are numerous in the Peace River country, among the mountains and on the west side of the mountains. It has been said that no white man can hunt a moose as weU as an Indian. As a rule the saying holds good. To it I have known a few exceptions, but only a few. The influence of heredity is in the Indian's favor. His eyesight is a derived faculty. It is a birthmark. The Indian's eye has ancestors back of it. A thousand years of practiced, developed vision THE GRIZZLY BEAR. BIG GAME. 163 is concentrated, and peers from under his brows. The aboriginal eye is the best in the world. It is literally microscopic. In moose-stalking this counts. The stalker who can stalk without noise, and whose eye is as good or better than the moose's, gets bim every time. The eye wins in moose-hunting. " Antelopes are not game. They are too pretty to shoot, and too simple. Their curiosity is so enormous that it dominates them. It places them entirely at the mercy of the sportsman, and hence every true sportsman spares the lovely creatures, unless absolutely com- peUed to kiU to appease his hunger. But the big gray wolf is legitimate game, and the great, gaunt, hulking O O ' OyO-/ <-7 brute makes a good target; and his pelt is not to be despised, for when full furred it looks well, and a dozen 164 DAYLIGHT LAND. of them make a warm robe, or overcoat even. These wolves are everywhere to the north of us, and often make good sport as you traU onward. " The reason why the great area north of us is to be commended to the American sportsman," said Jack in conclusion, " is because it is the present home of the bis: game of the continent, and is accessible. The O O J raUs bring you to your saddle, and the saddle takes you to the end of your trail. And after my way of thinking there is no method of locomotion so healthy, so stimulating, and so thoroughly enjoyable, as you have with a good, tough, easy-gaited, well-trained pony under you, trafling over the great plains. Pushing down toward the north from Calgary you have the prairie land to the east and the Rocky-Mountains to the west in fuU view; grasses and flowers, running streams and groves of trees, pure air and lovely camp grounds; a climate of even temperature, long, lingering twUights and early dawns, and that most deHghtful O O J J o of aU sensations to a traUer, — the feeling that you are visiting an unknown section without danger or O O excessive toU, and in which game is abundant. Even if you cared nothing for game, and were only seeking a glorious outing, I can imagine no excursion Hkely to yield more health or pleasure to a party of refined and intelligent lovers of the outdoor world and Hfe than one pushed down toward the north into the Peace River country from Calgary, keeping the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains in sight on the left as you journey along. Granted a good-sized (. prairie schooner,' a good cook, a good teamster, and a good party, and BIG GAME. 165 after my way of thinking you have aU the conditions of a good time." " So say I," cried the Judge, as he rose to his feet and extracted a smaU package from his coat pocket, " and I wish we boys could aU start on such a journey tomorrow. But one thing, Colonel Goffe, you could not do. The court would not aUow it; you should never be permitted to take that old combination musket of yours along. It is more dangerous than a * sugar trust,'" and the Judge proceeded to open the package in his hand, which proved to contain nothing but smaU oblong pieces of pasteboard with grotesque pictures upon them. " Judge John Doe, what are those things you have in your hands ? " exclaimed the Colonel, in a severe voice. " They look to me like a pagan cryptogram, and if Mr. Ignatius DonneUy gets hold of you " — " That wiH do," interrupted the Judge cooUy, as he began to move his fingers up and down over the package in a manner to make the shps of paper come and go in a strange fashion, " that wiH do. Colonel Goffe," he added as he prepared to sit down on his camp-stool, " these are cards, sir. This is a poker pack, and in spite of your innocence I propose that you and I should have a game " — " Sit down, Judge," said the Colonel kindly, as he moved the Judge's stool a Httle closer to him. " Thank you, Colonel," rephed the Judge, in a molH- fied voice, evidently touched by the Colonel's courtesy. 11 will sit down," and he did — on the grass ! 166 DAYLIGHT LAND. " You villain! " screamed the Judge, and jumping to his feet he grabbed the camp-stool and pursued the Man from New Hampshire around the corner of the tent, foUowed by our voUeying laughter, while even the Indians standing around grinned broadly. ^<* Wife Is there not A tongue in every star, that talks with man, And wooes him to be wise ? Nor wooes in vain. This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars. RIDE, — and such a ride as no ancient ever took, although he were a a ride upon a steed without feet or wings, and yet a steed which swept us through sunht space and starht gloom faster than hoof of speed or flight of wing. To the south, the prairie land stretched green and fragrant with summer growth and bloom to o o © the far southern Gulf. To the north, the same lovely level swept to the lower edge of the great Mackenzie basin, — that far river of the north of which few know but Httle, and most know nothing. Its length, longer than the Mississippi's; its climate, although upon the edge and within the rim of the Arctic circle, stiH warmer than Dakota's; its plains, within whose vast 168 DAYLIGHT LAND. boundaries Eastern States and Provinces might be placed and lost; the growth of its rich soUs, barley, wheat, peas, and all life-feeding vegetables, together with those hardy flowers which grace our Northern tables: these and other marvels born of isothermal Hnes which, curving hither and yon, laugh at lines of latitude, — are not these things scoffed at by the stay-at-homes as myths and idle tales? Why, then, teU of the great possibilities for healthy men and happy homes lying far to the north of present settlements ; of mUHons on milHons of acres that only wait for the plough and the seed, the sower's hand and the harvester's sickle, to yield the hungry world the bread it needs, if it will not beHeve the truth ? Yet the world wiU read the poetry of this far-stretching land, and, reading it, wiU by and by come to the knowledge of its economic facts, — perhaps. To the south, then, the plains stretched to the Gulf ; to the north, half as far. To the east, the great lawn extended nigh three hundred leagues. To the west, in the glory of sunset, its sapphire splendors spread over the fixed blue of heaven and the floating fleece of clouds, arose the barrier of a great mountain waU which reached to the south and north as far as eye might see. Never in aU my journeyings had I seen such a sight. The foothills, in the distance and gathering gloom, were flattened out of view, and the green prairie land spread to the very foot of that majestic waU, as level as a floor. At the far edge of this extended emerald field, the monstrous range, its hither side darkened with firs and evening's gloom, rose in might and ma- K<!RRB9^PRK*flS^9SP^!^*M^n!^P!!^^^^SSSf^S9nin CANON OF THE THOMPSON. A STRANGE MIDNIGHT RIDE. 171 jesty. It was as if I had come at last to the very ed^e of the world, which God had fenced and barricaded, fixing with almighty power the limit of man's wandering and discoveries. Toward this monstrous barricade, this base of gloom * O that stretched far as the eye might see to the north and south, we drove in silence. Behind this wall the red sun slowly sank. I saw its quivering orb of flame rest on a peak of snow that at its touch kindled to the brightness of a burning star. On either hand a hundred other peaks flashed like newly Hghted beacons. Is it for warning or for guidance, I queried to myself, — for the weird sight stirred my imagination unwont- edly, — that those hundred beacon fires, stretching in front of me on either hand a hundred miles, are kindled high in heaven ? Thus, then, was I hurried onward fast as set wings might carry me, with my gaze on the peaks, the fading fire in the sky, and the growing gloom. Slowly the crimson faded; slowly the sapphire colors lost their splendors; slowly the orange lights were blanched, and the warm tones that filled the heavens chiUed into gray, and then in the far distance my eye saw only a blue sky pointed here and there with starry fire, and between it and me, sharply edged, cleanly cut, strongly defined, stood forth domes of snow and pinnacles of ice. Many sights of splendor have I seen in wandering by day and night; many pictures such as man's hand could never paint have I gazed at, both at noontide and at midnight, when for my entertainment, as it seemed, 172 DAYLIGHT LAND. — for being there alone I only saw, — Nature kindly shifted her etched or painted scroUs. Many weird sights have I gazed at floating on northern waters in O O O the night time, when aU the woods were sUent with lo- O 7 cal stillness, and round the Pole, by hands unnamed by science, unknown to superstition even, were Hghted the mystic fires which iHuminate with awful and shifting splendors the end of the world. But never in wandering by day or night, on plain or mountain slope, or surface of forest lakes, have my eyes beheld a spectacle so strange and startling, or an exhibition so magnifies o* o cent, as I saw, gazing westward through the gloom at 7 7 o o o o the summits of the Rocky Mountains, with the world around me darkened into gloaming and the dead sunset lying on the bier of Night beyond. Between the dark earth and the blue sky, the black flatness and the star-lighted dome, the whiteness of the peaks drew a line of startling effects from north to south, held in mysterious suspension between earth and heaven as far as eye might range. Steadily we roUed onward. Behind, the roar and rumble of the train ; ahead, the stillness of nature's undisturbed repose when man sleeps and animals walk velvet-footed. The sun had set. The moon had not risen ; yet it was not dark. A strange half-Hght filled ' ** O O the world. The train I could not see, for I was riding- J O ahead of it. The power that drew it, whose mighty throbbings I could feel as though within me, pushed me through the air as an arrow is pushed from the bow. I was being whirled along as a bird is whirled when it rides the tempest. The dusk was fragrant with BBS A STRANGE MIDNIGHT RIDE. 173 unseen bloom. The earth odors were blown into my nostrUs. I breathed the strong life of the world, and felt its strength come to me as I breathed. Suddenly, on my left, I saw a snowy owl sailing with set wings westward. Was it the ghost of the day that had just died that had been forced at last to leave the world it loved so weU ? The spectral vision raced us a race and won, and far ahead I saw its snowy plumage fade and lose itself in the distance. A flock of ducks, startled from the sedges of the lake we skirted, whirred upward out of sight. I thought it strange that I could hear their feathered stroke so far away. Above me the great round eye of the headhght blazed like a sun. A coyote sprang upon the track, stood for a moment gazing at us, its eyes two diamond sparks, its dirty gray coat gleaming white and beautiful as silk, then slunk away, and the gloaming hid it from sight. Suddenly, above us and ahead, a flock of mighty birds swept into view, — their bodies white, their legs half the length of a man's, their long, broad- bills crooked like a spoon, yeUow as gold, their wings, shading from their white bodies into raven black, O a stretched wider than a man's hands could reach. They were peHcans, those mighty birds that float upon the prairie lakes as large as swans, whose vans beat the air # with strokes stronger than an eagle's. One such bird might make a trophy for a hunter more noble than horns of elk or head of moose. They gave no cry, but circled like spectres into sight, and like a ghostly visitation disappeared. Thus into the night I ghded, holding converse with the night, — a wingless bird myself,, flying with birds. 174 DAYLIGHT LAND. Those who know Nature only by day know only half of her, and the least interesting half at that. Nature has two faces. Both are beautiful, but one is supremely so. The one is as a human face, glowing, sunhghted, tanned, scarred, it may be, perfect or imperfect, as the day is. Her night-time face is as an angel's, the face of one that has been translated from flesh to spirit, and by the translation lost its grossness and become ethe- realized. Its beauty is that beauty which is vefled, which gains from having its lovehness suggested rather than o o OO revealed. The nude is always unsatisfactory, for loveH- ness is ever a thing of suggestion rather than revela- o oo tion. He who sees all plainly sees too much. As sight would rob religion of the glory of faith, so it robs lovehness of the benefits of imagination. One may tire of Nature by day, — the sun makes her common. When morning has fully come, we may go within-doors and eat; we may go to our toU; we may strike our tents and move on, weary of the dusty road. For not until the glare is passed and the hot sun dimmed by coming shadows and cooled by falling dew, need we halt on the march or come forth from our doors to look about us. Verily to the lover of Nature, whether on plain or amid hiHs, or shore of sea, the night is the time to wake. Then should eyes be opened as stars and orbed for vision, as is the moon when it roUs in rounded perfection through the lighted skies. And oh, the voices of the night! The day is tuneless. Man monopohzes it with his noises; with the murmurs of his trade, the roar and rumble of his com- sgww A STRANGE MIDNIGHT RIDE. 175 merce; with the strident caUs of his shoutings, his cursing, and his turbulence. But with the night comes O' O that sUence which is vocal. Then Nature sings. Her tunefulness is heard abroad, and her soft melodies come sweetly to Hstening ears. The sod finds speech; the brook murmurs to the banks; the trees whisper and caU in sylvan concert; and through aU the fields a thousand tongues, unknown among the languages of men, break forth in sweet expression. To many I know that what I write will be a mystery, or only as the joining of meaningless words, but to others it wiH come freighted with soberness and truth. For they, as weU as I, have camped upon the shores of lakes amid the circling woods; have stood alone at night on boundless prairies, and thrown themselves down amid the grasses and flowers, unable to sleep because of the glory that was above them, the odors that they breathed, and the sweet sounds which came to their charmed ears from nigh or far. And others yet have stood upon the top of mountains when the sun went down, and with gladness seen the shadows darken and the stars come out, watching for them as for loved faces not seen for years, and have sat on the bare rocks, hour after hour, and watched them draw their golden circles through the blue above, and in the silence heard aU the tones of memory and the prophecies of hope. And when at last they slept they found the granite softer than a downy bed shut in with waUs and doors. These, reading, know what I mean, and that I say the truth and He not when I say that he who has seen Nature only by day has seen only the lesser half of her, 176 DAYLIGHT LAND. and in one sense, and a true one too, has not seen her at aU. Still on- !!P^|ptJd <**>*«& war d w e drove. Here and there the grade sloped downward, and j then the i mighty train flew like a j J&*&** meteor. It was not rid- in g ; we were being projected into space, we were being shot through O O the air. The atmosphere was cool, dewy, fragrant. In the declensions of the prairie, fields of white fog enveloped the track. Into and through these soft layers of fleece our faces da Out of them they rose as from a bath of spray shed, drip- MiM Wit A STRANGE MIDNIGHT RIDE. 177 ping with perfumed water. How delicious the sense of Hfe became ! There was not a slow vein in us. We flowed fuU to the brim with vitality. The consciousness of happy, buoyant Hfe was in us as never before. The wild forces of the world were round us, and we were of them. We were of the atoms of the universe, of which each atom is superlatively vital. We were all ahve. We throbbed and panted on the rising grades Hke the engine. Down the long declen- O <-J o o sions we reeled and rollicked like a frohcsome meteor. We whirled along through the gloom Hke the birds of OOO night which we startled from the sedges. We roUed O O biUowing onward Hke the great herds of cattle which our shrieking flight stampeded. We thundered around the bends of the river furiously, and the snorting horses in mighty bands burst wUdly away from the blaze of our headlight as we dashed into the ranches, heads tossing from side to side, eyes blazing like diamonds, manes and tails streaming their pomp and pride of flowing hair afar. Thus through the short summer night we rode or flew. Twice the monster that bore us so steachly and swiftly stopped at water and stood panting. Around it crowded a mob of wfld - looking creatures, — the Indians of the plains; Blackfeet, who rank with the Sioux for courage; Crees, whose kindred wigwams stretched to the coast of Labrador; the Assinniboins or " Stonies," whose tongue connects them dimly with the tribes which trap upon the shores of far Mistas- sinni ; these and the scattered remnants of other tribes thronged around, wrapped within blankets, sflently 178 DAYLIGHT LAND. gazing at us as we sat upon the engine. ■"> viiu. A wild* looking set of beings no man ever saw. Their long, coarse, raven-black hair hung low upon their bosoms and shoulders. The wind at times blew the black tangle of it over their faces. These were painted with red and yellow ochres, which heightened indescribably their wUd, fierce aspect. Their blankets were of high colors, some of a soHd red, some red with black stripes, whUe others were checkered in blazing squares. The plumes of eagle, raven, and pelican were knotted in their coarse locks. They said nothing. They asked no alms. The brakemen, oUers, and wheel-testers flashed their lanterns into their faces, and joked them pleasantly. They made no answer and they never stirred. What were their thoughts ? I wiU stir them up, I said. I stepped to the side of an old chief, — a tall, wrinkled, and withered Blackfoot, — and said, 1 Chief, are you thinking that this prairie land was the land of your fathers for a thousand years ? that their bones are under its flowers to-night, and that their spirits are hunting the deer and the buffalo this minute on the mighty sand-hills there to the east ? that this fiery monster I am riding is the EvU Power that has banished your game, robbed you of your hunting-grounds, and destroyed the strength and glory of your race ? Do you not hate it and us who manage and use it ? " He Hstened with his gaze fuU on me. I knew by the flash that came into the black eyes that he understood, but his face gave no sign and he spake not a word. But I had told him the truth, and he knew it. The Indians you meet on the line of this Canadian SAPOMAXICOW, OR CROWFOOT, Chief of the Black Feet Indians. If A STRANGE MIDNIGHT RIDE. 181 road are finer specimens of the red race than those met with on the lines that run through the States. The early French treated the Indians with humanity, the EngHsh with barbarity. The Hudson's Bay Company's commercial instincts prompted wisdom, — the wisdom of justice and mercy; and so its factors and agents continued on in the Hne of humane French precedence. The Canadian government naturally feU heir to this pohcy of wisdom, and in the main has striven honestly to Hve up to it. The beneficial effect of this treatment is apparent to the most casual observer. The Indians of the Canadian west and northwest are not like the debauched and degraded vagabonds we find hanging around the stations of our Western raUroads. They are weU-clothed, cleanly, healthy-looking, and in many cases fine specimens of the red race. The women are weU dressed and of decent appearance. The boys look vigorous and the girls healthy, and not a few of them handsome. They look as if they were stiU capable of taking care of themselves, stiU had a right to live, and a place reserved for them by the bond of honorable engagement in the land of their fathers. Instead of O O being a painful spectacle to the Continental tourist, the Indians of the plains between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains, a stretch of nearly a thousand mUes, are objects of interest and pleasant surprise. At last we noticed a change in the air ahead of us. The darkness began to change to gray. The stars above us shone with shorter beams. A pale Hght spread over the vast plain. A flock of geese wedged their way laboriously northward through the ashen 182 DAYLIGHT LAND. p-loom. To the left, in the bend of Bow River, a herd O of cattle stood in the fog, their heads and backs showing above the white fleece, their bodies invisible — a strange effect. The old, old fight, older than the world, was being waged around us, — the fight of Hght with darkness. The attack and defence were equally stubborn. There were no charges, no sudden dashes, no quick recoU or recoveries of position. The movements were vast, slow-motioned, immense. The stars from pole to pole telegraphed the result. The horizon Hne of the whole world showed us, as we gazed, the victory and the defeat. Suddenly, high in heaven, the summits of the mountains, an endless line, shone pearly white. Below the gleaming spires their monstrous bulks were black as night. It was a sight to see with lifted hands. Then all the world grew rosy. The low- O J lying fog fields crimsoned. The foothills sprang into view. The clouds blushed. The sun without warning had kissed them. The icy peaks flashed white like electric lights. The sun leaped from the far eastern grasses, and Morning, with a rush of glorious color on her face, took vivid possession of the world. And thus, with faces wet with dew, our nostrils fiUed with forest odors, our eyes bright as the eyes of those who had discovered a new world, we dashed into the amphitheatre of the everlasting hiHs, and stopped at last, our glorious ride ended, and stood, in the red Hght of the morning, gazing bewUdered, astonished, at that mar- veUous expression of Nature's beauty and majesty- known to the tourist of this western world as Banff. CHAPTER X. BANFF. ; There was a sound of revelry by night." N the northeast side of Scotland, if you wUl look at your maps, gentlemen," said the Judge, " you wiU find this name of Banff. To teU you the story of its transplanting would be to give you the history of a Hfe, — a life which began there, and being removed here developed into one of the strongest personaHties of the continent. The once poor boy at Banff has since become one of the chief forces of this western world. No higher compliment could be paid him than to give this mag- 184 DAYLIGHT LAND. nificent location the name of his birthplace. But no one who knows the modesty and greatness of the man, and the services he has done this country, wiU say that the compHment is excessive." I There is no reward too great," exclaimed Mr. PeppereU, I there is no reward too great for a man whose faith and courage have opened up such a country as this to civilization. Such a man has enlarged the opportunity of human effort, and made happy and prosperous homes possible to millions." We were standing at the celebrated Sulphur Spring at the time, one of the many natural curiosities which make this location famous. There were only four of us left, — the Judge, Mr. PeppereU, the Man from New Hampshire, and myself. We were aU old traveUers, and saw that in Banff alone we had a good week's entertainment, without going beyond it a rod. " This water smells bad enough to cure a man, that O 7 is, if he was very sick," said the New Hampshire man quietly, as he lifted a cup of the heavily-tinctured water to his nose. "I know a man who left his lameness in that spring," said the Judge, reflectively. " It may be that is what I smell," added the Man from New Hampshire, laconicaUy. By this time we had passed through the tunnel that has been bored into the ledge, in the centre of which Nature had hoUowed that strange cavern from whose bottom boU the waters of healing. o I At that time," continued the Judge, ignoring as not worthy his attention the facetious remark of our IWJ*I,,UI -LIU**!* T BANFF. 185 companion, " at that time, this passage had not been excavated, and the only way to reach this curative pool was to be lowered by a rope through that aperture, up there," and he pointed to the hole at the centre of the cavern's dome, some two feet in diameter, through J 7 © which we could see the sky, and which originaUy gave vent to the heated atmosphere of the warm spring within. " They say," said Mr. PeppereU, " that the Indians used to bring their sick to this mountain side, and lower O 7 them through that hole into the warm sulphurous water ; and they declare that not a single man ever spent a day and a night in this cavern that was n't lifted out weU." " It would n't have taken a day and a night to have cured me," said the Man from New Hampshire, as he stopped his nose and started for the tunnel. " Any man would be a fool not to swear he was cured after being ten minutes in this oven ; for before this passage was cut, which gives its chimney a draft, it must have been close, mighty close, in here ! " " It does n't smeU Hke a rose," laughingly returned the Judge, as he shuffled on after us, " but a man wiH stand sulphur pretty strong to get rid of rheumatism." " They say that this whole mountain has a substratum of sulphur," remarked Mr. PeppereU, after he had taken two or three whiffs of pure air, beyond the mouth of the passage. " The Indians are poor theologians," said the Man from New Hampshire. "They located their heU at the Glacier ; they should have brought it this side of the range." o 186 DAYLIGHT LAND. 11 have always thought it strange," remarked the " that a man with the knowledge of MUton Judge, should have connected sulphur with the punitive suffering of the race, when, in fact, it is one of the most potent of aU curative principles." " Perfectly adapted for Purgatory," quietly remarked the Man from New Hampshire. I presume that four men never enjoyed a happier week than we spent at Banff. We roUed leisurely over the fine roads that the government had constructed, winding in and out along the bends of the Bow River, running along the base of the gigantic moun- 7 O O O O tains and through the cool forests of the firs. We explored, with the curiosity and eagerness of boys, the secluded places, and followed the dim by-paths, not knowing or caring whither they led us, happy, whether they conducted us to some noble prospect or terminated suddenly at some dripping ledge. We searched for curious minerals in the sides of the mountains, translated the geological records of the cliffs, and col- O O 7 lected polished pebbles from the bed of the foaming Spray. We slept at noonday under the pines, lulled to sleep by the FaUs of the Bow, and fished, not in vain, for its noted trout in the rapids. We watched the storm clouds vainly assault the monstrous mountains, that lifted their heads majesticaUy above the reach of storms ; Hstened to the thunder as it Jbellowed in the gorges and rumbled down the ravines; saw the rainbows grow, and shrink their arches of splendor,, and fade away ; and, at evening, sat in the great angle of the veranda which overlooked the FaUs five hundred nP|rjraarHinnnr«|| P BANFF. 189 feet below us, and saw the round moon roU up above the Fairholme range, and whiten the vaUey of the Bow with its silvery Hght. We admired the ample design of the commodious house, — a veritable palace, with interior finish of native woods pohshed to a gleam ; its wide stairways and galleries; the noble dining-room, with its lofty ceiling, which tho Judge pronounced " fit to be a banquet-haU for the gods ; " and the large verandas that encircled the entire house, as if to invite the guest to enjoy, to their fiU, the majestic scenery which stood grouped around it. " Here," exclaimed Mr. BonnevUle, " here, is a continental enterprise of which, as a continental man, I am proud. A year ago and what was there here ? A forest, a sohtude. And out of that forest and soH- tude, at the touch of courageous enterprise, this noble structure has risen with aU its appurtenances of comfort and luxury, as in the mind of the dreamer a vision arises in the darkness of night." " The only vision," said the Man from New Hampshire, " that whHe it dehghts the eye, ever fuHy satisfied the stomach." " The climax of civilization," remarked the Judge contentedly, as he accepted a cigar from Mr. PeppereU's case. " A perfect climax of civilization. The dessert at dinner to-day made me profoundly grateful that I was not born a barbarian." " Had you been, you would have civilized the tribe and imported a French chef, Judge," retorted the New Hampshire man laughingly. At the appointed day the scattered members of the 190 DAYLIGHT LAND. party kept their rendezvous at the hotel. The house swarmed with guests. A cosmopolitan company in truth. The continent in its every section, almost, was represented. The nations of Europe and the islands of the seas were there. The flags of old England, of France, and of the Great Repubhc were fraternally intertwined. Science and art, poetry and letters, music, beauty, and wit were joined in bright companionship. A programme for the evening's entertainment had been prepared and the Judge appointed master of ceremonies. The stars Hghted the world outside, and within the electric globes flooded the house with their white radiance. " Ladies and gentlemen," began the Judge, " this is not, I wiH honestly confess, my maiden speech, and yet I find myself affected as if it were. I am embarrassed, not at the courtesy of your suffrage, but at the novelty of my position. A citizen of the Golden Gate, I find myself in the Dominion of the Queen, surrounded by an audience representing almost every section of that Empire on which the sun never sets, every State and Territory of the Great RepubHc, and almost every civilized nation on the face of the earth. We, the citizens of the RepubHc, moved by love of country and of institutions which are precious to every lover of Hberty wherever he is found, wish to hold a social reunion. With that modesty for which we Americans are noted the world around, we proceeded promptly to appropriate this hotel and "aU the resources for entertainment in the estabHshment, including yourselves, surreptitiously inveigled under the name of guests, that BANFF. 193 your elegance, your wit, and your beauty might add bclat to the occasion. This piratical proceeding we proceeded to legalize by a process invented by us Yankees known as the ' Town Meeting;' a process which has been wittily described as enabling the original New Englander to steal his lands from the Indians, become a, rebel to his king, and change the commandments without doing violence to his conscience. At this meeting of my fellow-countrymen I was elected master of ceremonies, a dignity which I did not obtain, according to a quaint national custom prevalent among us, without being openly charged by my competitors with having reached the lofty elevation by a scandalous stuffing of the baUot-box. Here amid these everlasting hills, in this palace of modern luxury, with the flags of all nations intertwined, emblematic of that peace which not only now prevails in the RepubHc and its relations, but through the Empire of the English- speaking race, and with an audience more truly cos- mopoHtan than I have ever seen outside of the official halls of government, we hold our happy reunion. We Americans are not formal. We are not exclusive. The liberties of refinement wiU rule the evening. Literature wiU be honored. Music will be applauded. Beauty wiH be admired, genius receive its acclaim, the banquet table be spread, and then Terpsichore shaU dance to the music of the hours, till the flush of morning shaU turn the icy pinnacles of the mountains above us to the color of the rose." There was just that Fourth of July swing to the eloquence of the Judge, that rhetorical abandon, which 194 DAYLIGHT LAND. suited exactly the mood of his feUow-countrymen, and : we all cheered him as none of us have ever been cheered since our Class Day oration, when we electrified our sisters, our cousins, and our aunts with the flights of our eloquence. We aU cheered him immensely. The Man from New Hampshire, who had been a self-nominated rival to the Judge in his struggle for the chairmanship, prolonged his applause as if, like a true American when defeated, he would triumph over his hated rival by the exhibition of his generosity. " Ladies and gentlemen," resumed the Judge, when the Man from New Hampshire had subsided, feeling that he was the true victor, " ladies and gentlemen, I wiH first present to you Professor Blankton, of the Continental CoUege, an Institution not yet erected, but which nevertheless stands completed to the eye of faith, on the subscription paper — not largely subscribed to as yet — which he carries in his pocket. Professor Blankton wiH give us a recitation of an original composition prepared expressly for this occasion, caUed The Two Flags." " That you may understand, ladies and gentlemen," began the Professor, as with a graceful bow he acknowledged the generous reception we gave him, " that you may understand the location and natural surroundings of this Httle episode of American-Canadian Hfe, which I am to render, I wiU briefly describe them to you. I Below the Fraser Canon,' the savage sublimity of which cannot perhaps be equaled on the continent, the BANFF. 195 Fraser curves to the right, and sends its deep, strong, down-rushing current with a suUen roar against the ° O base of a mountain. And he who stands in the curve below Yale, and looks up that wide reach of water to where it rushes out of the gloomy pass, from between walls of rocks which rise six thousand feet above it, sees as grand a spectacle and as sublime a vision of river and mountain as he may find on the continent. Opposite this curve, on which you wiU imagine yourself standing, stretches a plain, acres in extent, lying enclosed in the curve of the great stream, under the rounded banks of which, when the water is lowest in summer, stretches a bar of brown sand. From that bar a crowd of Americans, who had broken through the *J O vast mountains from California, in 1868, took in a few days more than a million of doHars of granulated gold. From this fact it received the name of American Bar, a name which it retains to this day. On the plain above the bar, directly in front of the monstrous mouth of the Fraser Canon, were camped more than six hundred of our feUow-countrymen. " It is doubtful, ladies and gentlemen, if. a rougher, braver, more reckless crowd were ever seen-in British Columbia. They represented the frontier of our country; that frontier which stands for exploration, mad ventures, audacious enterprises, personal courage, coarse bravado, manhood wrecked, recklessness of Hfe, and generous impulses. In it, every State and Territory of the Union had its spokesman. The dialect, the personal characteristics, the humor, even the profanity of each section was represented by its true type. Many 196 DAYLIGHT LAND. were old forty-niners, men who had crossed the plains on foot, rifle in hand, when the East went wUd at the news that gold could be had for the digging beyond the Nevadas. Youth and age and middle hfe .were there. Ex-army men, Blue and Gray, Reb and Yank, worked as partners, and starved, feasted, or gambled together as luck smfled or frowned. Some signed their name with that sign which stands with equal facUity for piety or ignorance ; and others in the hush of evening sang the songs of their Alma Mater to the o o o listening pines and sUent stars. Many were ignorant of any grammar, and others might have served as Queen's Messengers, not only in European but in Asiatic courts. Many were scarred with wounds received in battle or private fights. AU were armed, and ate and slept with a pistol at their hips. And while they gambled or bet heavUy when in money or Hquor, nevertheless drunkenness was exceptional and fights uncommon. A crude but effectively administered justice guarded property and life. Thieving was unknown at American Bar. ' It does n't pay,' said Light-fingered Dick to his partner, who had learned a useful trade under the direction of his native State: * it does n't pay in a community so damned ignorant that the court has only one classification for crimes and inflicts but one penalty.' Still it cannot be said that this crowd of gold-seekers were precisely the kind of men one would select for church-membership, and certainly more reckless dare-devUtry was camped that summer at American Bar than could be easUy grouped in any other spot on the face of the earth. You now BANFF. 199 have the knowledge of the location and characteristics of the occurrence, and I wiU proceed to give you the story of — THE TWO FLAGS. 1 Let these two flags go on like twin Stars in equal courses moving.'' " It was the Fourth of July. The sun stood equidistant between the monstrous cliffs that made the waUs of the Black Canon, pouring its rays straight downward upon the foam-whitened surface of the racing water. On the plain in the elbow of the river stood the camp, and on the bush-cabins and old, soUed tents the rays feU brightly and hot; aU the hotter they seemed to the revelers on the sand, because above and around them, as they looked through the heated air, they could see the cold gleam of glaciers and the glint of ice against o o o o the blue sky. The camp was in hohday mood ; not a man was at work at the Bar. To have hfted pick or pan would have started Judge Lynch that day. They had struck luck at the Bar and their mood was exuberant. Some were pitching quoits, using smaU bags of gold dust for their quoits, each caster risking the bag that he cast; others were engaged in pistol practice, the buU's-eye being a gold eagle at fifty yards. The buUet that hit won the eagle. Some were whirling O o knives at bank notes. In every tent poker was being played with a recklessness that would frighten a railroad magnate. Two men were pronouncing an oration on Liberty at either end of the camp, whUe a scholarly looking man, considerably exhilarated with something 200 DAYLIGHT LAND. stronger than the inspiration of the poet, was vainly endeavoring to pronounce the measures of a patriotic ode he had composed to a throng of uproarious auditors. I Suddenly at the mountain end of the central street, a throng of men appeared, bearing on their shoulders a flag-staff with the halyards aU rigged. At their head marched Hoosier Jack, who was * loaded with lead ' at ShUoh, carrying a staff from which waved a yard of bunting, with its thirteen stars aU faded and the glorious stripes sadly bleached, frayed at the edges, if the truth must be told, and | damnably out of repairs,' as Bangor Harry asserted; but symbohc stiH of Hberty to man, and of the great country which stands for that Hberty the world over. Ahead of it marched the band, composed of a Httle snare drum, two fifes, and five fiddles, playing Yankee Doodle with a celerity of movement and an earnestness of expression which more than compensated for the artistic deficiencies of the performance. " But, oh ! the cheers and the yeUs that greeted that Httle cheap flag as it came down the street! The emptying of tents, the rushing of the gamblers; the peU-meU that ensued ! In the rear of those bearing the flag-staff the procession was formed, and twice through the camp the cheap, faded banner was carried, and then in the centre the flag-pole was set, the bunting knotted to the halyards, and up went the Stars and Stripes, while every head was uncovered and the eyes of many grew dim as they gazed. And as the flag went up and the breeze shook it .out and the sunshine brightened BANFF. 201 the faded stars and bleached stripes, a cheer, hoarse and strong, stormed upward Hke the roar of a tempest, startling the goats on the crag and the fish-hawks at the mouth of the Canon, and Bangor Harry, climbing O J 7 o to the top of some cracker-boxes with his six shooter for his baton, constituted himself leader of the music of the occasion, and in his clear tenor voice, resonant as a bugler's caU at sunrise, began, — ' Yes, we 'U rally round the flag, boys, We '11 rally once again, Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom; We 11 raUy from the hillside, We '11 gather from the plain, Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom. Chorus : The Union forever! Hurrah ! boys, hurrah! Down with the traitor, up with the star, While we rally round the flag, boys, Rally once again, Shouting; the battle-cry of Freedom.' I Whether it was the exhilaration of the occasion, the swing and sweep of the verse, or the thriU of pride that the symbol above their heads was theirs once more, or the magical memories of the old days before the war, we cannot say, but we simply record the fact that when the singer had reached the chorus, and the great crowd of rough, bronzed, strong men took up the refrain, Arkansas Reb and Mississippi Pete, who had ' bored the old flag' in twenty battles, joined in as vigorously as if they had been born under the slope of Bunker HHl. 202 DAYLIGHT LAND. i The song closed in a roar of sound which might not be designated by Thomas or Zerrahn as music, but which fully answered the demands of the occasion, and at a word from Bangor Harry, every revolver left its owner's hip, and six hundred pohshed muzzles gleamed in the sun. Six voUeys foUowed the signal of the leader with a precision which demonstrated that they were more practiced in the use of the " iron | than in the chromatic scale. 11 You fellows,' said Bangor Harry, as he crawled carefully down from the top of his cracker-boxes, 'you feUows ain't much at singing, but you have all got the classical touch on the trigger.' " It was in fact an exuberant and exciting crowd, a crowd which the least touch would have exploded for fun, patriotism, or deviltry. And it was at this unfortunate juncture — unfortunate for him — that out of his bush shanty crawled Bloody Edwards, a big, aggressive, red-faced London cockney, who had come through the mountains with the crowd from no imaginable reason save sheer accident, and stiU remained with them because of tolerance on their part and excessive indolence on his; for there certainly was nothing in common between this lofty-acting, boastful cockney from London and the free and easy, reckless men among whom he was staying. A more boastful, swaggering braggart never breathed. The most offensive Briton was in him typed most offensively. His favorite superlative was * bloody!' It answered even the purpose of his loyalty, which was so excessive as to tax language to express, and gave him his name. BANFF. 203 " At the very moment when the vast crowd was fairly boiling over with excitement and ready for any mischief, came Bloody Edwards upon the scene, swaggering offensively and waving a smaU, red, British flag in his hand. Planting himself in the centre of the street in front of the six hundred exhUarated Americans, he waved the Httle banner flauntingly over his head, and howled — 11 Urrah for the Flag of Hold Hingland!' o o " For an instant the crowd never moved; each man stood sUently in his tracks, and then with a roar came the rush. It struck Bloody Edwards like a land sHde, and swept him, as if he were a bit of debris, to the bank of the river. Then out of the roar lanced a voice, ' NaturaHze him! naturalize him ! Make a Yankee out of the cockney !' and six hundred voices took up the cry — for the humor of the idea pleased them — | Aye, aye ! NaturaHze him; he shaU take the oath of aUegiance. Make him swear by the Stars and Stripes !' I But the cockney refused to become a Yankee; refused point blank, and garnished his refusal by expletives known only to the slums of London. I \ Curse the cockney,' exclaimed Cambridge Jack, * the fool acts as if he had a choice in the matter;' and then he screamed, ' Dip him! Dip him! Cool him down in the Fraser! He shaU swear by the Stars and Stripes, or drown !' And the crowd took up the words of Cambridge Jack, for the cockney had no friends; he had not acted to make any, and surely no flag up to this time had ever had a less manly repre- 204 DAYLIGHT LAND. sentative than the banner of England had found in the person of this boasting, swaggering, insolent cockney, Bloody Edwards. And so the crowd took up the cry of Cambridge Jack, prompted thereto by the sense of humor and the dislike of the cockney, and yelled, ■ Into the Fraser with him ! Cool him down ! Teach him manners! He shaU swear by the Stars and Stripes, or drown !' And then the crowd gave one surge, and upward the cockney was swung, and down to the river they rushed him, and into the depth of the cold, icy river, that river that never was warm and never wUl warm until the elements melt, they plunged him. " But underneath and within the punk of his cock- neyism, untouched by the rot of the surface, was a sound streak of old EngHsh oak. For as the big, red face came out of the ice-cold tide, he blew like a porpoise and yelled again, — " < Urrah for the flag of Hold Hingland !' O O " i Down with him! Down with him again !' yeUed the crowd to Blarney Pat and Confederate Dick who had him in hand. And downward they plunged him ; down into the coldness of death, that glacial cold in that river of glaciers which chiUs and whitens quick and sure for the grave. Downward they sent him and again, as he came to the surface, he feebly sputtered, — I < Urrah — for — the — flag — of — Hold — Hin — gland !' " By this time it was evident that Bloody Edwards was sober, sober as a man who from birthday had never touched ale, and that it was not the reckless bravado born of Hquor, but the buU-dog grit which made BANFF. Poictiers, Cressy, and Waterloo what they stand for, which held him to the Hne whose ghastly white men O */ dread, so stiffly — the indomitable EngHsh grit that was in him. i And this it was which won on the crowd and even on the two men who had twice plunged him into that death-cold current, that current which never yet gave back to Hght of day a body that once touched its bottom. For Confederate Dick, as he looked into the big, red English face that now lay drooping weakly on the buH-like neck, exclaimed in sheer disgust, — " ' Curse the English fool, he won't give in !' Then O 7 o up spoke Bangor Harry, as he thrust himself to the front of the surging crowd. o o " ' Boys, the darned fool is of the same blood with us if he is beefy bunt; for his grit proves it. The red flag he 'd die for owned the continent before the Stars and Stripes spht it. And the two own the continent stiH betwixt them, and shaU own it forever, by Heaven ! Three cheers for the red flag of England, the old mother-land of us all.' And suddenly out of the throats of the six hundred men who had swarmed over the border searching for gold, above whose heads floated the Httle, cheap fifteen by twenty bunting with its stars bleached and its stripes aU faded, there burst as hearty a cheer for the cross of St. George as ever EngHsh gunners sent from bloody EngHsh decks when & & J o through the smoke they saw their foeman's flag come floating down. " Then out of the water they lifted the cockney, they roUed him and rubbed him, and twenty flasks were 206 DAYLIGHT LAND. tossed through the air to the men who had him in hand. Then they took the flag, — Cambridge Jack was the man, — and bent it to the halyards, side by side with the Stars and Stripes, and they hoisted the two with loud cheers. "' DivU take the rag!' said Blarney Pat as he pulled lustUy away at the halyards. ' DivU take the rag, but the b'y that won Waterloo was born nigh KiUarney !' " But this was not aU, for a strange thing happened, strange enough at any time, but doubly so happening at that very moment. Scarcely had the cheering died than along the river's farther bank there came a cir- chng wind, marking its progress with dust, dead leaves, and withered grasses, which at its touch sprang upward into air. Across the rushing river, across the Bar, it ran its circhng course, jumped the dry bank and rushed across the bend, and in its career struck full and fair the staff from which the kindred banners waved; out of their fastenings tore them, and, twined together, blent as one, sent them soaring upward through the sunshine toward the blue sky and the white summits of the Canon, eight thousand feet above the throng of swarthy, scarred, and startled faces gazing at them. " Thus in sUence stood the camp. Not a sound was heard save the rush of water as it whirled around the Bar or fretted along the shifting edges of the golden o o o o beach below. SpeUbound and marvehng at such strange hap, their jests aU checked, their rude talk sUenced, they stood at gaze, their eyes fixed on the flags as they went up and onward, lifted higher and higher into the BANFF. 207 blue. StUl upward and onward they soared; and not until they were to the eye but a fleck of color, not until that fleck of color had touched the level of the icy peaks and the summit line of snow, not until the winds which pour forever over them had caught the flags and they were about to disappear, borne on by winds which flow forever round the world, was that solemn sUence broken. But as the blended flags, now O 7 but a speck of color, were about to fade forever from their gazing eyes, the voice of Bangor Harry rose strong and clear, with the genuine Yankee nasal struck clean through the words : — 11 I 'll be darned if God Almighty has n't joined them two flags together ! ' " The Man from New Hampshire was mightily stirred by the recitation, and when he lifted himself from his chair, and standing erect, swung his white beaver over his head and cried, " Hurrah for the flag of Old England, the mother-land of us all! the great veranda trembled to the roar of the applause which burst from the laughing, cheering throng. Then " Music arose with its voluptuous swell. Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell." The long, wide piazzas made such an ideal ball-room as is seldom seen I When youth and pleasure meet To chase the slowing hours with flying feet," 208 DAYLIGHT LAND. for above them the blue star-fretted heaven was for a roof, and the free, odor-fiUed breeze of the mountains gave to the waltzers such air as eagles breathe. Be- O o neath their feet the pohshed floor, under the electric Hghts, shone Hke ground of glass; upon the hills and.into the valley the moon poured its soft Hght, whHe to the music of the band the FaUs far below added its steady roar — a heavy monotone of power softened by distance. Into the solemn sohtude of nature, into the undisturbed sUence of ages, within the enclosure of mountains old as the world, whose summits were white with snow that feU in the morning of Time and had never melted, man — the social man — had burst, erected his palace, spread a table of banquet, and summoned music and pleasure to the feast. The strength and grace of form, the gleam of silks, the flow of soft-toned draperies, the flash of gems, the loveliness of snowy necks and arms, the glowing cheek, the laughing Hp, the buzz of happy talk, the harmonies of music — aU were here, making a rare, sweet, bright picture of human happiness. So passed the hours untU the dawn gave rosy signal for retiring and the first I American Night" at Banff ended, as it should, in a lovely morning. ON THE TOTE ROAD. CHAPTER XI. NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. ' Hills piled on hills, on mountains mountains lie." ROM the Gap, but a Httle way beyond the beautiful Kananaskis FaUs, to Yale at the outlet of the celebrated Fraser Canon is nearly five hundred mUes, and it is a very moderate statement to say that nowhere else on this continent or in Europe can the tourist see from his parlor car such a magnificent exhibition of mountain scenery. Here is a section of the transcontinental journey in respect to which the traveler can experience no disappointment. It is not only that he is constantly running along the base of mountains of gigantic size and im- O o o mense altitude by which he is stimulated and impressed, but these mountains are of every shape and color, 212 DAYLIGHT LAND. present themselves to the eye in an infinite variety of appearance, and are individualized by strong, novel, and imposing characteristics. Here stands one of such immense bulk and height, holding such a relation to the Hne of travel, that it dominates the landscape and fills the gazer's horizon from edge to edge. Passing this monstrous obstruction to the vision, the eye suddenly beholds a range pinnacled with eternal snow and flashing crests of ice, whose briUiancy is the reflection of ages. Anon, he is whirled around a curve, on a track so cut into the beetling cliffs that at a distance it looks like a dark thread spun in the air and drifted by the wind against the perpendicular wall, and lo, he is in the midst of a hundred mountains, tumbled promiscuously together, a vast jumble of chaotic misplacement. At one moment he is rolling swiftly down a vaUey, as green with springing verdure, as odorous with flowers, as peaceful and lonely, as the Happy VaUey of Rasselas; above it the bluest of skies and the brightest of suns, with a flashing river running with musical ripphngs through its centre ; and at the next, the train is groping its way along a narrow gorge O J- CT */ o O O cut sheer through a mountain range at the level of its base, with the black, rocky sides rising abruptly thousands of feet on either hand, a river of vast volume, outracing the train at his side, here running in white CT ' O flights, there whirling in dark pools, whue all the black air is fiUed with its hoarse complaining and explosions of thunderous rage. Now it is a lonely lake, with its beaches and its sedges, its islands and its reflections of sky and cloud and mountain, and its signs of swim- NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. 213 ming, flying Hfe, which charms him; anon he gazes entranced, amazed, breathless, at a glacier hanging in O O O white, green, flashing lovehness, ten thousand feet above him, or looks with awe upon a vaUey between two ranges filled for mUes and miles with snow to the very peaks, as he remembers that the human race is not so old as that thawless field before him. Such another five hundred mfles of traveHng is not to be had on the face of the earth. If this strikes the reader as an exaggeration, as it may many — I can only say that it is not. It is a simple statement of an extraordinary fact — a statement which every traveler whose knowledge of the globe is adequate for comparison, who has been over these five hundred miles, wiU confirm. He who journeys from Kananaskis FaUs to Fraser Canon wiU experience sensations — however blase with worldwide travel he may be — against which his indurated nerves are not proof. We four — the Inseparables, as the Man from New Hampshire facetiously caUed us — left Banff with bright anticipations. Our eyes were as open to see and our spirits as buoyant as if we were boys. We had had a week of pleasure at the " Palace of DeHght," as the Judge poeticaUy named the huge hostelry among the mountains, and our last night had been one of rol- Hcking enjoyment. In our dispositions we typed the best habit of Americans when traveHng — the habit of self-surrender to the enjoyment of the hour. There can be no question on one point concerning our countrymen. They are the best travelers in the world, not because they travel the most and spend money the 214 DAYLIGHT LAND. freest when journeying, but because they get more knowledge and happiness out of travel than any other people. The inconveniences and deprivations which roughen the temper of the average EngHshman only quicken the humor of the Yankee and supply him with entertainment. He travels as a bird flies, utilizing to his enjoyment the opposition of adverse currents, feeds contentedly on the wing, and sleeps restfuUy on any perch to which the flaws or whirlwinds of unlucky happenings by day or night have gustily blown him. The world likes him and he likes the world, and hence he finds welcome everywhere, and the welcome he gets he thoroughly enjoys. Like a snaU, he carries his home around with him on his back, and easUy adjusts himself to any condition of shine or shade. The happiest mortal one can meet with is an American in his travels. Speaking but one language and that indifferently weU, he hobnobs cheerfuUy with aU nations, uses with the courage of ignorance all languages, and o o o O 7 makes fast friends wherever he goes. We started from Banff in the best of spirits. Had we been in sombre mood, even, the extraordinary vision of beauty and sublimity we beheld would have speedily brightened it, for the sun was just rising above the eastern mountains, and the freshness of morning was on the world and in the air around us. Our course lay along the pebbly banks of the sparkling Bow and up a forest vaUey. We skirted the VermiHon Lakes and ran along in full view of Mount Massive and the snowy peaks above Simpson's Pass. We whirled around a curve, and the eastern view of PUot Mountain flashed WL NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. 211 whitely upon us, and then in a moment the Castle jumped into sight, and we studied with de-. Hghted eyes its mighty precipice, its embattled turrets and shapes of fantastic armament. We were wise enough to be boys. We felt no indifference and we assumed none. We were expectant, receptive, f uU of happy anticipations, with un- jaded nerves, eager to break voice in our excitement as a young, highly bred hound in I his first race. I Judge," I said, looking into his flushed face as he gazed with deHghted eyes at the reflection of a moun- 216 DAYLIGHT LAND. tain in a smaU lake-like pool lying waveless at its base, " Judge, how old are you this morning ? " O 7 */ <—' " Sixteen, — only sixteen, thank God ! " he cried. " This is my first vacation out of Darmouth," exclaimed Colonel Goffe; and he swung his hat and yeUed Hke a freshman after miraculously passing his first term examination. We were all looking for the first glacier. " There it is ! " I cried suddenly; and I pointed through the gap towards the lofty peak of Mount Hector. Like a river it lay, — a river at full flow, which had been frozen soHd as it roUed onward and downward; frozen soHd and broken off, leaving only a crystallized section exposed to the eye. It was white, with green Hghts shot through its frac- 7 O O O tured and curved extremity, crescent shaped at the end; a monstrous motion suddenly sohdified as it plunged downward, and fixed forever in the spot where it hung suspended high up and far off in the air. Above the forest, above the great bulk of the mountain, from the very peak, hung that strange, monumental appearance, a miracle of nature, a mystery of the elements, a wonder to the tourist, Hke the vision of a poet or a dream of uneasy slumber. Glacier after glacier we saw after that as we roUed onward through this region of marvelous appearances, this land of enchantment, many larger, many higher, many more lovely, more imposing, but none of the hundreds we looked upon later impressed us more powerfuHy or fixed themselves with deeper impression upon the memory than "V. CATHEDRAL PEAK. B2I NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. 219 this first one we saw chained to the crest of Mount Hector. We were now nearing the summit. The grade rose O o steeply. The huge engine clomb laboriously upward. It breathed heavfly, Hke a chopper in prolonged effort, when his axe cuts to the centre of the tree and with quickening blood and persistent strokes he dehvers each successive blow more fiercely. The cliffs panted back to it. Now and then its circular feet sHpped, but it clung desperately to the raUs. " That engine has good grit," said Mr. PeppereU. " How it hangs to it." " I feel as if I would like to get out and push," rephed the Judge. " Do it, Judge," said the Man from New Hampshire. " I 'U sit on this camp stool and hold your coat." "Colonel Goffe," returned the Judge sternly, "the Court fines you a Reina Victoria for that contemptuous remark." I AU the sentences of this Court end in smoke, I notice," retorted the Colonel, as he handed the Judge his cigar case. " Here we are at Summit Lake," I exclaimed; and even as I spoke the engine ceased to pant, and the train began to ease itself along swiftly. O O -J How beautiful is a pool among the mountains! SmaU as it may be, how it can coUect and reflect the great world above and around it! It may not be as big as a cliff, and yet a hundred cliffs are in it. A single pine may bridge it, nevertheless it accommodates mUes upon miles of forest. SmaU as it is, the great 220 DAYLIGHT LAND. sun comes and bathes in its depth. Acres of clouds float through it. The sky, the numberless hills with all their countless trees, the mountains so vast, their innumerable peaks, — within its scant space aH are grouped and none are crowded. Sweet miracle of the woods, placid mirror of the hills and skies, gentle eye of the forest upon whose clear retina is focused the sublimities of heaven and the beauties of surrounding earth, how often hast thou lost me game and sport because thy lovehness held me pensive at thy grassy rim! " I wish," cried the Judge, " I wish I could stay a week here and do nothing but sit on the shore of that Httle lake and gaze into its depths." " And I wish I could be the artist to sketch you in that position," said Colonel Goffe dryly. " If I should put you in the foreground you would hide the whole lake." Downward we roUed. We glided smoothly onward O J as a wing in easy flight cleaves the air. " This is the poetry of motion," cried the Judge. " We are floating around this mountain's verge as if we were in a balloon." " Look at this ! " Mr. PeppereU exclaimed. " Here is a picture that money can't buy." We were crossing the gorge of the Wapta River and the sublime scenery which characterizes this section was opening up ahead of us. The train was running very slowly, creeping firmly but carefully along. It seemed to be conscious, and to be clinging tightly and safely to the mountain around whose awful curvature NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. 221 it was making its way with practiced fortitude. It suggested a sailor busUy knotting a reef at the yard's end. It is a frightful suspension, but safe — to him. At the right of us the mountain sloped downward sharply a clean thousand feet. To the left it rose nearly sheer upward eight times as far. A black cloud smothered its summit from a hundred gazing eyes. Within its o o «/ enveloping blackness a glacier lay white, cold, and pulseless in its eternal swoon. Suppose it should be suddenly shocked into Hfe and motion and plunge wUdly downward ! How it fascinates you to imagine the terrible when you are safe ! To the north a valley, wide, far-reaching, immense, a landscape in itself, unexplored, stretched away in magnificent perspective to distant peaks, white with snow that wiH never melt. Far up this vaUey, lifted high among nameless summits standing like grouped spear points, was a glacier, wide as a frozen sea, deep as an ocean, unvisited as yet by man, half of it in black shadow, half flashing with blinding whiteness under the 7 O O sun, a mute chaUenge to the courage, the skill, and the science of the continent to come and measure and name it. Ahead of us Mount Field reared high its black summit. Then rose Cathedral,Mount upon us, faded from sight, and came again into view as we ghded onward. O 7 O <-' A majestic, solemn, suggestive presentation of massive bulk and altitude it made, standing out in clear, sharply edged outlines against the blue sky. WhHe above aU, loftier, nobler, more varied and impressive, rose the vast mass known as Mount Stephen. 222 DAYLIGHT LAND. None may describe this mountain. It is not Hke its fellows round about it. It is not Hke common mountains. It has an individuaHty aU its own. Our artist has caught its spirit and given a resemblance — but at what a remove from the real Mount Stephen itself. It s* ■ is not a mountain to be put in a book, to be printed on a page, to be hung on a waU. Some mountains lend themselves kindly to such patronizing treatment, but Mount Stephen is not of this sort. It cannot be translated from the wUderness and the sky on to canvas. It cannot be snatched from its envelopment of clouds and NAMELESS MOUNTAINS. 223 hung from a peg on a parlor waU. It cannot be coaxed from its native sunshine and shipped to Boston per express. It is a mountain to go to, to visit, to see brilliantly revealed in the sunhght, to gaze at dimly outlined in the dark, to behold in the Hght of dawn, in the red of sunset, under the stars of night, when the moon clothes it in white splendor from summit to base line. Go and see Mount Stephen so and you shaU find in the vision the memory of a lif etime. *■ CHAPTER Xn. SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. _T3g4l. T was the Sabbath day and we were *L- at Field. With us were a company, tourists like 'ourselves, who had decided to spend our Sabbath among the mountains, making of it a day of rest in truth. And if among the mountains, where better than at Field, under the shadow of Mount Stephen, and with a multitude of majestic altitudes aU around us. The afternoon was weU advanced, and all of us, quite an audience in numbers, were grouped on the piazza, when we saw a gentleman strolling down the track to- CT O ward the hotel. He was taU, bronzed, and had an Alpine knapsack at his back and a note-book in his hand. | There! there comes the clergyman we have been 11VI1 ■xs m o o o c < s SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 227 praying for aU day," cried a young lady to her companion, at my elbow. " There comes our clergyman, and now we can have a regular service; won't that be nice! " And her pink palms met in a way to express the fervor of her rehgious enthusiasm. " Jennie, dear," said her companion, a motherly looking lady, " you are always jumping to your . conclusions. How do you know the gentleman is a clergy- •/ O O*/ man at aU ? " I Ah, I know he is," she reiterated with emphasis. " But how do you know ? " the other insisted. " WeU, because — because — he don't look a bit Hke one ! " she rephed. Nevertheless, in spite of the young lady's assertion, the gentleman who was slowly approaching us did look somewhat Hke a clergyman. And when he had ioined O*/ *J us and we had engaged him in conversation, our impression as to his clerical status was deepened, for he spoke with much feeling and with true spiritual discernment of the rehgious relations of nature. But whatever doubt remained was suddenly dissipated when he opened his knapsack, for as he did so the leaves of a manuscript closely and careful written were plainly discernible. " My dear sir," said the Judge, " I cannot but consider your coming as providential. This is the Lord's day, and here we, a company of Christian wanderers, find ourselves spending the holy day among the everlasting hiUs. We desired to hold a rehgious service, but are as a flock without a shepherd, for there is not a clergyman among aU this large number of tourists. 228 DAYLIGHT LAND. But now we are, if I mistake not, dehvered from our dilemma, for you, my dear sir, are — are you not a clergyman ? " 11 am sorry that I am compeUed to disappoint you," answered the man, " but I am not a clergyman." " Not a clergyman ! " exclaimed the Judge; " surely, sir, that manuscript there must be " — " No, that is not a sermon," interrupted the stranger, smiling. " It is only a story." " I think a story is as good as a sermon, any time," cried the young lady who had been so confident that the new-comer was a clergyman. "And if it isn't too awfully joUy, I wish the gentleman would read it to us. My eyes ache from looking, and I would like to close them and see with my ears, as papa says, for half an hour." " My dear sir," exclaimed the Judge, " the young lady has voiced my feeHngs admirably and I doubt not the wishes of the company, and if your story is not of too Hght a nature, I pray you read it to us, and feel that you are doing us aU a positive service. I can promise you, sir, an attentive audience." " The story I would read you is sober enough for the day," responded the man, 1 and suggests a theme fit to be meditated on within the shadow of these awful surroundings even; nor wiU it be of less value because it is of the nature of a personal experience. If you wiH arrange yourselves to easily hear me, I wiU gladly read you the story." In a moment some fifty of us were grouped around the stranger, and certainly no preacher or author ever ROSS PEAK. SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 231 had a more attentive audience than we gave him as he read the strange tale; and surely it would take a long search to find a sermon weighted with a more CT O starthng thought. At least, so many of us said at the end of it. THE TWO GRAVES. It was in the autumn of 1878, that I found myself riding through that portion of Canada which borders the northern shore of the Ottawa, some hundred miles above its junction with the St. Lawrence. The day was one of a series pecuhar to that time of the year and that section of the country. The heat of summer had departed, cliiUed southward by the advancing frost which the arctic cold had posted in advance to give warning of its approach. But in the vaUeys and along the hedgerows which skirted the southern o o exposure of the mountains, the dehcious warmth still lingered, as if loth to leave the pleasant haunts where it had so long tarried, happy in the music of the running brooks and the birds that sang in the odorous o o bushes. Indeed, it seemed as if here and there it had determined to resist its savage foe ; for in nooks where the russet leaves lay thickest and in the wedge-Hke crevices of ledges it kept almost its August warmth, as if it felt safe to await a fiercer attack behind such formidable barricades. I had ridden already a goodly distance, and neither I nor my horse was in a mood to hurry; the reins lay loosely on his neck, and he picked his way along the 232 DAYLIGHT LAND. grass-grown path with the leisurely step peculiar to his species when neither their inclination nor that of their riders urge them to a faster gait. Perhaps he as weU as I enjoyed not merely the slowness of the pace, but the nature of the surroundings also; for his large, observant eyes studied the flaming bushes as closely as mine, and to his senses the mingled odors of the dying grasses and withered leaves, blended with the fragrance of the evergreens that Hve on through win- O O CT ter and summer alike, may have been as grateful as they were to mine as I breathed them in. I had just turned a curve in the road and was descending a gentle slope — a mountain on my left and a stretch of level woodland on my right — when I suddenly came upon a clearing, of some three acres in extent, enclosed by a fence. Age had weakened the settings of the posts, and it no longer kept the trueness of the original lines, but sagged and swayed at different points, whUe here and there the winds of winter had blown sections of it prone to the ground. The grasses had grown through the pahngs, and masses of running vines formed over them, whose leaves were now aflame with color. I instinctively checked my horse to more closely inspect this unexpected opening in the woods, involuntarily looking, as I did so, for the house or the ruins of the house that one day stood, as I naturaUy supposed, in the clearing; and it was not until I had quite reined my horse into the cleared space, passing through a gap which the winds had made in the enclosure, and looked.the field over more closely, that SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 233 I discerned that it had never been intended for human habitation, at least not for the habitation of the Hvin2\ O' but had rather been set apart for the repose of the dead. The space, in short, hi to which I had ridden, was a cemetery. No sooner had I made this discovery than, impelled by curiosity in part, and in part by reverence, I dismounted, and throwing the reins over a post which had once been one of the piHars of the main entrance, I stroUed further into the solemn field, with emotions such as would be natural to a man entering a grave- O O yard thus suddenly discovered in the depths of the woods. I Here," I said to myself, " the former settlers of this once inhabited but now deserted region He buried. A majestic place for a burial ground, truly; " and I glanced upward at the surrounding mountains which Hfted their vast sides round about the vale. | Truly," I continued, " here is a fitting place for the weary to rest after the trials and fatigues of Hfe. The aged who had long borne the heat and burden of the day and they who were suddenly checked in manhood's swift career, husband and wife, parent and chUd, aU could here find the peace which comes after strife, and that sweet rest which waits on human toil. It is pleasant to think that nature, after the fret and fever of life were over, so kindly provided them, amid the very scenes where they toUed and doubtless suffered, a place to repose." Thus moralizing, I cast my eyes about to discover the number and the grouping of the graves, not doubt- 234 DAYLIGHT LAND. ing I should find many, and with them monumental evidences, of however humble a sort, that affection had remembered them when they had passed away; but to my astonishment I could discover only two graves within the entire enclosure. These were situated side by side, on a slight elevation that sweUed its summit near the centre of the enclosure. Confident that further searching would reveal more to me, I made a careful inspection of the field, until I had traversed it from corner to corner and had convinced myself that this strange graveyard was so not only because of its location, a place set apart for the dead where there were none to die, but also because, large as it was, it held but two graves. 1A stranger graveyard than this," I said to myself, " was never seen, for of aU the burial places that men ever set apart, of such goodly dimensions as this, I doubt if there be another on the face of the whole earth so sparsely populated: the tenantry of kindred fields is generally crowded enough, and he who has the fortune to occupy a place therein never lacks for neighbors. I wiU approach the graves and see what memorial affectionate custom has traced upon these lonely slabs." So saying, I drew near to the two graves and proceeded to inspect them more closely. They were placed some eight feet apart, both facing to the south. It was evident from the size of the mounds that they had been bunded for adult bodies, and apparently near the same time. The grasses had matted thickly over both, and a running vine whose main root had sprung from the earth equidistant be- JL SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 235 tween the two had sent a branch out impartiaUy toward each. It had grown so luxuriantly that it had embraced either mound, and sent its creeping tendrUs even to the top of the two short and narrow slabs of plainly-wrought stone, such as rude skill might easily have quarried from the ledge in the neighboring ravine. It seemed as if nature had, by the growth of her vine, tenderly united in suggestive unity the two mounds, which, standing farther apart and without connection, would have been lonely indeed. " Surely," I said to myself, " this is a quaint and touching spectacle. Only two graves in aU this field, and they lying side by side on this Httle eminence and so affectingly connected. Is there some sweet conscience in nature which forbids her to decorate the one and leave the other unadorned ? " And I remembered the saying «/ O that the rain faUeth alike on the just and unjust. 11 doubt not," I continued, " that these two who sleep here were brothers, who had nursed at one maternal breast; who had labored in this vale and on these hills side by side, and who, struck down by death, perhaps simultaneously, were brought by reverential hands in the slow and solemn fashion of the country and with priestly benediction laid side by side. Or perhaps they were two friends strongly attached, some David and Jonathan of this forest glade, who, being so closely united in Hfe as to furnish a proverb of loving companionship, in death were not divided." FUled with such pleasant imaginings, I kneeled on one of the mounds and with my hand gently moved aside the viney tracery that garnished its white surface 236 DAYLIGHT LAND. with ruddy ornament, in order to read what might be carved beneath. "James Flynn, aged 60 years, 8 mos. and 9 days. Born AprU 10th, 17—. Died Nov. 14th, 18—." I then turned toward the other mound, and kneeling on it lifted the vine from the face of the other slab and read, — " John Peters, aged 61 years. Born May 19th, 17_. Died Nov. 14th, 18—." " Buried the same day," I said, rising to my feet. " Buried the same day, and for these thirty years their dust has mouldered side by side. Old men too, honest and honored, I doubt not; brothers they certainly were not, but friends they must have been, or surely they would not have found such close vicinage in death. Old men, who had Hved their Hves out until the crescent of their youth had come to the f nil rounded orb of its perfect sphere. Happy in having outHved their passions and the fraUties and bitternesses that come therefrom, happy indeed were they," I added, " in having entered, before they came to their tomb, that peace and pleasantness of mood which give to the aged the chiefest beauty of their earthly life and the perfect preparation for the Hfe to come." WhUe I had thus been pleasantly musing I had almost unconsciously been walking toward my horse, and with my mind stiU fiUed with the thought of the two graves I had so suddenly found, and was so soon to leave, I placed my reins on the neck of the animal and my foot in the stirrup, saying as I did so, " I would that I knew the history of the two graves thus so 9! SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 239 strangely placed in this quiet field, and of the two men who have slept and are destined to sleep so long in them side by side." " I can teU you the history of the two men " — I turned so suddenly at the unexpected sound of a human voice that the speaker was checked in the midst of the sentence he was uttering. He was a man, old and white headed and bowed with years, for he carried a staff in one hand and was even then leaning heavUy upon it. I noticed also that the hand that grasped the stick trembled and shook with that pecu- Har tremulousness which so often accompanies the weakening of muscular power. Was it something in the fit and color of his garments, was it something © ' o in the dignity of his mien, or was it because of the peaceful expression of his countenance ? From whichever one of these causes, perhaps from them aU combined, I conceived that he belonged to the clergy. " Reverend sir," said I, releasing my foot from the stirrup and turning toward him, " reverend sir," said I, and I uncovered my head, " I am journeying through the country with a companion who is now on the road some mUes behind me, and coming suddenly upon this opening, I observed the two graves yonder and judged that this was a graveyard. Moved by that impulse common to human hearts in so solemn a place, I entered the enclosure to discover what memorials affection had reared above those who sleep. But to my astonishment I have been able to find only two graves in aH the field, and I was marvelling, as you interrupted me, at the strange spectacle; so strange that 240 DAYLIGHT LAND. I doubt if its equal can be found in aU the world, the spectacle of a graveyard with only two graves." 11 doubt not," responded the old man, " that your observation is correct, for though I have seen many graveyards myself, and helped to lay many to sleep therein, I know no other aUotted to men's final repose in which the number of those who sleep is so smaU; ' and he added, " I would that these were not here, for a sadder lesson than they teach has never been my lot to learn, and the recoUection they recaU, as I behold them lying here alone, forms one of the saddest memories of my life." " You speak, reverend sir — for I judge you to be a clergyman — as if you had knowledge of them." The old man paused a moment before he rephed. His eyes were turned toward the two graves, and in them was a far-away look as if they ranged backward across the dim distance of many years ; then he added, "I officiated at the service when those two graves were made." I Indeed," I exclaimed, " indeed! then may I hope to learn something of their history, and how it comes about that only two sleep in this sacred field and they sleep side by side. I should Hke to know of the lives of those who are its only occupants. Surely there must have been some peculiar history attached to them, — some tender passage in their fives, a life-long sympathy of a notable and noble sort, — to account for the fact that two, who by their names, it would seem, were not akin, should thus be lying in their last sleep like brothers, inseparable even in death." SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 241 " Your surmises are far from correct," rephed the venerable man. " They were not brothers, as you have suggested, they were not even friends, they were bitter enemies. u Enemies ! " exclaimed I, " enemies ! great heavens ! How came they then to be buried side by side ? " " Your astonishment is but natural," was the answer. " It was strange, it was unnatural, it was even irreverent, but it was in accordance with their wish, — I may say their express command." 11 pray you," said I, rehitching my horse at the post, " I pray you, if your leisure permits, teU me the tale, for certain it is that my mind cannot conceive why two enemies should desire to be buried side by side. Surely human Hfe is long enough to exhaust the force of human hatred; or is it a part of that fierce fire which is never quenched, not even by the waters of death, or the smothering dampness of the grave ? " " I wiH comply with your request," responded the aged man, " for I am weary with walking and would willingly rest a little space before I pursue my way. You must know, then," he continued, as he seated himself on a stone opposite me, " you must know that I visited this place partly that I might see once more the beauties of nature in this secluded spot, and partly that my eyes might behold again the scenes that were once so familiar and, I may add, so grateful to them. " Thirty years ago this little vale, now so reposeful, resounded with the hum of human activity. In yonder mountain side you can find a shaft sunk by the miners' skiH, in search of the rich ores which were then be- 242 DAYLIGHT LAND. Heved to He buried within its sides. Here, in the depths of the forest, a viUage sprang up, as it were in a day, and men of many nationahties came pouring into this secluded glen in what proved to be a vain search for gold. Providence guided me to this spot, even with the first wagon train that penetrated here, and here I stayed and ministered the best I might to their eternal good, until the last wagon left the glen forever. Ah, those were stirring and noisy times," mused the old man, as if he once more saw the bustle and heard the noise of the busy encampment. " A hundred axes swept the mighty trees from yonder slope, and half a hundred cabins rose as by magic on the banks of yonder brawling stream. The giant pines that then stood where is now this clearing furnished the waUs of their habitations, and from yonder rock, by which that aged beech-tree stands, I preached the best I might, to those who came seeking earthly wealth, of that other treasure which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal." " I do not doubt," I said, as the venerable man paused a moment in the recital of his early efforts to lead men to be wise, " that your endeavors were as successful as I feel they were earnest." " They were not whoUy in vain," rephed the other reverently, " for I had the everlasting word and the spirit that quickeneth to assist me, and even the foolishness of preaching did not whoUy fail. For with two exceptions the toUers in the mines and they who tilled the open spaces, where nature made tiHage possible, Hved in peace one with another and outwardly, at least, kept the laws of God. SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 243 " I said aU but two; these two were men of another country and another clime. Both were dark of face and mood, and scarred in unknown fights. It was whispered that they had met in deadly conflict years before, and that the scars of each were of wounds made by the other. But none knew, perhaps, for certain, for they were of a sort Httle given to speech and told their history to none. " That they hated each other they did not conceal, and their hatred was of that quiet and deadly sort most painful to see. They were not loved by any. They were even shunned by those with whom they toUed. Indeed, they were the dark spirits of the camp, for it might scarce be caUed a settlement, and their presence was universaUy regretted; and yet they made no disturbance; but whether from the pecuhar orderliness of their surroundings or because each with the patience of deadly cunning bided his time, there was no outbreak between them. 1 For two years they worked side by side. By a strange fortune, for the cabins were built in common and then drawn for by lot, the one drew No. 20, and the other 21, and so they Hved side by side in sUent hatred." "It was a terrible way to Hve," I remarked, for the strange tale interested me deeply, " and certainly a stranger fortune never befeU two foes, than to thus meet in a foreign land, scarred by each other's blows, and toU side by side by day and Hve in houses that almost touched, hating each other with terrible hatred, and yet never exchanging word or blow." 244 DAYLIGHT LAND. " It was, indeed," returned the old man, " a terrible way indeed, and I did what I could to bring them to a better mind. God knows I labored with them and strove in prayer in their behalf; but my labor was in vain, and my prayers, for some wise purpose, were never answered, for their hearts remained hardened, and I could make no salutary impression on their wicked souls. " The mines, which at first had been productive, suddenly gave out and no longer paid the expenses of working them. And at the end of two years they were abandoned and the settlement prepared to disperse. When scarcely a dozen remained and these, myself among the number, were preparing to foHow those who were already gone, the two men, who had made no preparations to go and were evidently intending to remain, for the purpose, I doubt not, of meeting once more in savage conflict with none near to O O thwart their deadly intent, were suddenly taken sick. Humanity forbade that we should desert them, and we tarried until the end should appear, but their sickness was unto death, and we had not long to wait. " They died the same night. The one but a few moments before the other. I attended at their death beds, but had no other reward than the consciousness of duty .done. The one that died first showed no concern save for one thing; asked but one question, Would the other die ? A brother miner standing by his side answered, * He wiU not Hve an hour.' " For an instant the Hght of a wild, fierce satisfaction blazed balefuUy from the eyes that were already half EAST OTTERTAIL. ■P-H SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 247 eclipsed behind the shadow of death, and in what seemed to us to be an imprecation breathed ih an unknown tongue, the wretched man straightened himself in his bed, and with the deadly scowl stiH on his face, and the passing curse stiH quivering on his Hps, died. It was a terrible scene, sh*." " It must have been," I exclaimed, " it must have been ; but did the other show no repentance ? " " None whatever," was the mournful reply. " From the presence of the dead I went to the presence of the dying. A miner who had worked by his side in the shaft, and was in some sort a comrade, was standing by his cot as I drew near. Life was fast ebbing away, and what might be done must be done quickly. I begged that I might pray with him. He refused. I gently urged him to repentance. He smiled in mockery. Suddenly starting from the deadly stupor settling on him, he asked the miner if his enemy were Hving. He was told that the man had even then died. A look of fiendish satisfaction flashed through the gloom of o o his swarth face, and lifting his clenched fists he brought 7 O O them down, smiting the couch with dying energy, as if it were the head of his foe. " i Have you any wish to leave behind you ?' asked his comrade. " | Yes,' he answered, and the words were hissed from between his teeth with indescribable fierceness. | Yes. Make my grave close beside his, damn him.' " It was a terrible scene, a terrible scene," exclaimed the old man, and for a moment he hid his face in his hands as if the distance of thirty years were not enough to shut it from his eyes. At length he resumed, — 248 DAYLIGHT LAND. " Unnatural and terrible as it was, we felt constrained, at least the miners did, to obey the dying behest : and so on the morrow the men who had hated each other in Hfe, and hated each other in death, were buried side by side." The old man paused at this point a moment, evidently oppressed by the memory of human passion and wickedness he had been narrating. At length his eyes wandered toward the two graves which nature had so impartiaUy adorned, and upon which nature's sun was now shining so kindly, and he added, — " There have they slept these thirty years, side by side, unknown and unnoted, save by some chanee traveler Hke yourself. And there wiH they sleep until the resurrection trump shaU sound and they shall rise at its commanding summons." " Surely," I exclaimed, " surely that morn wiH not find them in their hatred. Surely, reverend sir, you cannot beheve that when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and men come forth in obedience to its call, these two shaU rise with the old hatred in their souls ? " " I cannot teU as one who speaks from knowledge," answered the old man, " but I have studied the characters of men these sixty years, and noted the laws that seemed to underHe their changes, but have seen nothing to warrant the behef that character, once settled and confirmed, ever changes. Habits change, men acquire new expression for their powers, but the character itself remains permanent and sohdly fixed as the everlasting hUls, unless previous to death a change is wrought by the Spirit through repentance." SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 249 " But, sir," I exclaimed, " does death, then, do nothing for us, and does the grave not bring a coohng to the fierce heat of human passion ? Surely one might judge by the way in which men of your profession speak at funeral scenes, that at the close of life, even in the act of its closing, there comes to men a needed and a blessed correction. Certainly I have heard them so express themselves, and I myself have found comfort in the faith that amid the darkest clouds of death the mourner's eye could always see a star." " I know that under the pressure of the scene, and of that humane desire, strong in every sympathetic heart, to speak some word that can console the present grief," answered the old man, " that my brethren do thus speak at funerals. And I myself have often been prompted to do the same and have often done it, but I am confident that the impulse of the moment was not born of reason and had no warrant in the Scripture, for the Scripture saith, * As the tree faUs so shaH it He,' and again, 'Let him who is filthy be filthy stiH.' And in these sayings, God does not, as I conceive, speak judgments on men, but simply asserts the permanence of human character, which, amid whatever of ruin may have come to it, retains at least the dignity of being true unto itself." " What hope is there for man, then ? " I cried out; " for if no blessed change may come and all must be in the hereafter even as they are here, if not swift- mercy matches the swiftness of the fatal stroke, I how can the eternal Father adjust the feelings of his bosom to mortal circumstance ? Venerable man, it is not for 250 DAYLIGHT LAND. me, who am untaught in doctrine, to argue with one 7 O 7 o like you, clericaUy trained and wise with years, but eternity is long and life is short. The cradle and the grave are ever in sight, and short the space and swift the passage from the one to the other. Must there not be at the end something to match the love that watched CT over us in the beginning, some sweet forgiveness to hover on tireless wing above our growing faults, some wisdom to constantly point out and some love to persuade us unto good, and in the end, if necessary, some almighty mercy to wipe, with one brave gesture of atoning pity, the stains of aU our faults and sins away ? Say, reverend man, does no such divine provision exist ? I It is but just to say that the old man was profoundly affected by the appeal, which, in the depth of my longing for human kind thus stirred, I had poured forth with unconscious earnestness. . He actuaUy groaned aloud, as if on his spirit, which it needed but a glance at his benevolent face to see was fuU of sweetest pity for aU the erring, there rested the Atlas-like load of human destiny. He groaned aloud, and rising from the rock on which he had been resting, he lifted his aged face to the skies and with tears marking their course down his wrinkled cheeks, he said : — I The heavens are fuU of mercy, that I know, and motherhood without sex divides, at least, with sterner elements the throne. But man is a mighty being; he is too great to change or be changed, save by his own vohtion, and when once the character is formed, when the tree has firmly rooted itself and clasped the move- SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 251 less rock beneath, — how shaH it change ? Whence shaU come the wish to change ? How out of concentrated evil shaU be born the holy purpose ? But young man," he added, as he took my hand, | you are young, and I would not dim a single hope that Hghts the world ahead of you, nor would I dispel any happy Ulu- sion, even, that may solace your grief when grief shaU come. For even Ulusions, if they be comforting, may serve a divine purpose. No, no, live happUy, in hopeful thoughts of men, for hope is often truer than logic. But these men were matured. Their minds fuUy made up, they died impenitent; aye, resisting overtures of mercy, they went into the grave mutuaUy resisting each other. What is there in that sflence yonder ? § and he pointed his long finger toward the Httle eminence on which the two graves were, " what is there in the sUence of their long sleep there to change them ? Do men change their natures in slum- o o ber ? Do they not rise as they He down ? The trump will sound. Those graves wiH open. Those sleepers there wiU wake — wake from their long sleep, and I fear they wiU wake hating each other stUl. For hatred Hves with the immortality of aU Ul;" and with these words the old clergyman bade me good-by and turned away. For a moment his eyes studied the surrounding mountains as if they were taking their long and affectionate fareweU; for a moment he stood and Hstened to the soft, musical lapsing of the stream that murmured through the glade, and then, supported by the staff he held, with feet that brushed the ruddy and 252 DAYLIGHT LAND. rustling leaves aside as they walked on, he passed slowly up the lane and disappeared from view. My conversation with the old clergyman had given me ample food for meditation. The strange history he had told and the fearful supposition he had advanced possessed my mind to the exclusion of any other subject. The lonehness of the secluded spot, when he had retired, seemed loneher than before he had joined me. The two graves seemed to deepen the solitude. They no longer suggested human companionship, but alien- ation, and between the two I seemed to see a great gulf fixed, deep and wide, such as relentless and interminable enmity digs between two souls. Would Heaven's mercy ever bridge a gulf Hke that, or would it yawn unbridged forever ? Was the old man right ? Is human hatred immortal ? Is there no solvent in the grave to check its eating corrosion or wash its deepening stain away ? Thus I, pondering, questioned destiny, and pushed my thoughts out into the eternities. How many have questioned thus. But has any human eye ever seen the stony Hps of this dreadful sphinx open in answer, or has any human ear ever heard a sure response ? The sun shone warmly along the mountain side and showered the lonely opening with its beams. The leaves were yeUow and thick at my feet, and my faithful horse dozed at his post. " I wiH wait for the coming of my companion," I said, and casting myself amid the warm leaves I leaned back against a moss-covered stone, and thus, half reclining, feU asleep. What are dreams ? Are they prophecies ? Were the SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 25 O old prophets only dreamers ? Are they senseless movements of the thinking faculty ? What becomes of the mind when we sleep ? Does it sleep too, or is it able to receive impressions, which the slumbering senses are then unable to report ? Are the visions that come to it mere fantasies, void of truth or reason? Who can teU ? I only know that I slept, and sleeping dreamed. And in that dream I was changed myself, and saw such changes in earth and men that I seek in vain for words with which to describe them. I said I was changed. I was. I was grown out of o o and above my old self and had become a new being. New sight was mine, new hearing ; I could see everywhere : I could hear everything. I ruled space. No sound, no motion escaped me. It was marveUous. This is the best I can do to describe the change in me. I said I saw changes. I did. There was no horizon to my vision. My sight was circular, and my eyes flashed great zones of observation round the globe in- O O stantly. How active men were, and how idle ! How sad, and how merry ! I saw them being born, I saw them dying. Some were praying, some were carousing, some were dancing, some were fighting ; and the mighty murmur of all their noises, their sobbing and their laughing, their groaning and their cheering, their praying and their cursing, as it sweUed up from the earth and roUed its waves of sound around the globe, came coUectively and individuaUy into my ears, even as ordinary sound is heard by us in waking moments. What a capacity I was, while like a god I lay, 256 DAYLIGHT LAND. seeing the whole world and hearing aU its varied noises. Does the body dwarf us so ? Does it bind us with withes of limitation as the PhiHstines did Samson; and is death but the snapping of the cords in the severance of which there comes back to us the mighty and original strength ? I wonder. o o Suddenly, even as I was looking with this aU-per- ceiving vision, and Hstening with this aU-receiving sense of hearing, sUence feU on the world. Not a *&> The guns of war noise ; not a voice; not a whisper, were dumb. Men were dumb. Volcanoes were smothered by their last explosion and their craters yawned sUently. The waves stiffened and stood rigid. Birds, checked in mid flight, hung fixed, as if naUed to the sky. AU Hving things stood stiH. The hush of an awful expectation feU on the world. Next, darkness! Darkness dense, instant, impenetrable. No sun, no moon, no star, no taper, no spark. The darkness did not come, — it was. The sun did not fade, — the moon did not wane. The stars did not grow dim by degrees. The fires of the earth did not pale. The candles did not flicker — aU Hghts, on the instant, in the twinkhng of an eye, exploded and went out. No noise, no Hght. SUence and darkness over aU the earth ! The world listened. Nature hid her face and waited. What was coming ? A noise, a sound as of many waters! A peal as of a mammoth beU rung by mighty and invisible hands in an invisible belfry ! A blast: a trumpet note, blown by immeasurable power; a note round, fuU, immense, SABBATH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 257 that captured the universe and filled it so that its very borders rang! The last trump ! The field in which I lay shook. A thrill as of awful terror ran through the sod. The turf seemed to creep and shrivel with fear. The two graves opened. The two men rose, and each standing in his coffin looked at the other, the same — great God! — the very same as when they died ! They had slept a thousand years, ten thousand, but aU the years had not changed them a whit, for the same hatred glared in their faces as they stood in the resurrection as when they died, cursing each other in the cabins that stood by the gurgHng stream. Yea, there they were, unchanged by aU the years that had come and gone since their bodies had been buried side by side, in that Httle clearing in the Canadian woods, ten thousand years before ! | Do those wretches know what an eternity there is before them ? " I said to myself, as I gazed in horror at the spectacle. " I wiH go and plead with them," and I was on the point of starting up when I felt a shock — a terrible shock — as if the soHd earth had exploded, and then another more terrible than the former. I screamed, my eyes sprang open. I Wake up ! wake up ! " It was my companion who was shaking me. I Wake up; what are you dreaming about, old boy ? " Thank God, it was a dream ! Thank God, nothing but a dream. Perhaps the old pastor was wrong, perhaps men do change, — perhaps. CHAPTER XIII. THE GREAT GLACIER. '' I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.' '.WEEPING around the point of a nameless mountain, we ghded into the dim, narrow vista of a snow-shed, five hundred yards, perhaps, in length. Here and there its gloom was crossed with shafts of Hght and checkered with gleaming rays, which made of the long vista a kaleidoscope of jet-black blocks bordered by bright, many- colored Hnes, changeful and Hvely, presenting to the gazer's eye a lovely picture to look upon; whHe far beyond, the aperture stared at us Hke a great white, expressionless eye, at which we rushed with rattle and roar and burst of thunderous soimd from wheel and truck, hissing brakes and belching funnel, but which, THE GREAT GLACIER. 259 unfrightened, stared steadUy at us without shrinking as we came hurtling on. In a moment we were shot out of the monstrous tunnel, framed with gigantic timbers, strongly braced as is the curvature of the world, on which the avalanche faUs harmless, and over whose roof, angled truly to the mountain slope and riveted into its side, the awful landshde, wide and long with the width and length of acres, its trees aU standing and its huge bowlders undisturbed, pours its vast mass into the ravine below, leaving this magnificent device of | -——& man's invention unshaken and unstirred. Onward we whirled, the majestic forest trees on either side. Upon our left a mountain slope, wide, high lifted, an immense stretch of sylvan surface; on our right a dark, deep ravine, down whose black bottom a glacial torrent drew its foaming Hne; when suddenly our engine curved sharply to the right, and lo, a spectacle of spectacles stood full before our wondering eyes. " Heavens! " exclaimed the Judge excitedly, " was there ever such a sight ? " Those who have traveled, who have wandered far and seen much, wiU teU you that out of the mass of things, places and faces they have seen, a few alone remain fixed and clearly outlined in memory. Many are the pictures we hang on memory's walls, but with the passage of time most fade to blackness. Only a few hold their colors fast, and fewer yet brighten them as the years go on : here an ocean scene, a storm, a drifting wreck Hghtning-lighted, or scudding Hke the ghost o O O O 7 o o of a ship through the tempestuous moonlight; or it 260 DAYLIGHT LAND. may be a face, — a single face, old or young, sad, Hving or dead, a friend's, a foe's, a stranger's; a stretch of forest, a mountain view torrent bursting from some savage gorge down which Chaos hurriedly traUed, f oUowed by her unformed remnants when driven from the face of the earth by the happy «^TS5£5r^£a£& or growing order of o o the skies. So travelers testify, and thus we who gazed, gray-headed wanderers aU of us, knew it would be with this spectacle which stood in start- 1 -I £7) 73 —J THE GREAT GLACIER. 263 ling clearness before our eyes, and which had risen into view on the instant from the depths of the savage Selkirks. It was a picture as clearly cut as some old cameo edged by that antique skiU that now is dead; as pronounced in the fines of its drafting as strongly contrasting colors in nature might make it: so varied in the figures introduced, so strange and even startling in"the grouping of its related parts, that upon the instant it dominated the mind and boldly challenged f or- getfulness. " Never did I see such a picture," said Mr. PeppereU in a low voice, " never, not even on the Fraser or the Thompson in the old days !" And this is the picture we saw, translated from its majesty and glories down to the paltry measurement and dull neutrahty of petty, colorless words : — A Httle plat rescued from chaos by man's love of order ; a level space of scant size, made by ironing out the corrugation of the hills; on this Httle platform, or plateau of level space, a cottage, unique in style, neither house nor chalet, but fitting harmoniously to the landscape; in front, a space graveled and platted for flowers, — a summer garden in miniature. In the centre of it a fanciful fountain jetted its glacial spray upward, where the wind caught it, and blew it at random through the bright sunhght, so that in flying and falling it fiUed aU the air with broken pearls, fragments of sUver, and sparklings of prismatic fire. Far below this scant level space, with its graveled walks, flashing fountain, and widely verandahed miniature mansion, dropped a gorge through which a glacial tor- 264 DAYLIGHT LAND. rent whirled its white Hne of hoarse noise. Sheer upward lifted the opposite mountain, a fuU ten thousand feet, its bold stimmit of steel gray rock weU named Eagle Peak, for only an eagle's wing might reach it. Down its imposing front a torrent foamed from top to base. Slowly through the long, lofty distance our admiring eyes swept their gaze until they rested upon the buttressed battlements of Sir Donald, which, pointed Hke a pyramid, interrogates the mysteries of star and sky, the golden course of wheeHng orbs, and the meaning of that blue depth and distance which He level, serene, and stiH, above the storms which vex the lower atmospheres. 1 That monstrous shaft," said the Judge, as we aU stood gazing at Sir Donald, " is a solemn interrogation of what is above and beyond." "Look at this," said Mr. PeppereU calmly, as he faced about. In the rear of the chalet a magnificent forest growth sweUed loftUy upward, symmetrical, proportionate, a lovely, harmonious whole, — a sylvan picture, vast of height, framed by the sky in massive blue, and fretted along its edges with scuds of mist and changeful drifts of cloud. Never had the eye of one of us wood wanderers seen a loveHer exhibition of forest growth; abundant, dense, soft-toned, untouched by fire, un- scarred by violence of shde or avalanche; a landscape scene of unmatched perfection. Slowly our eyes wandered down the pass and clomb the Hermit Range, peak by peak, stole along its slopes of ice, and crept beneath the glaciers, filling every MT. HERMIT, ROGERS PASS. THE GREAT GLACIER. 267 gorge, hanging poised ready to drop, or held, jammed in the vast amphitheatres where they have been held beyond the count of years, and where they wiH remain, unmoved, unmelted, until time is ended or the present order of creation passes away. So we stood steadfastly gazing at the vast vision, enraptured, when an exclamation from a man behind us faced us around, and there, to the north and east, we saw a sight which may not, perhaps, be matched in its grandeur and surroundings on this earth of ours. A CT CT glacier, vast, lofty, immense, buttressed, fissured, creviced, — a section of the Mississippi tUted up obhquely and frozen soHd; the St. Lawrence pouring bodUy over a mountain range ten thousand feet above you and turned on the instant into ice, stiffened soHd at its maddest plunge; a creation of ten thousand years; a monument above those past, dead years, which aU the rain and shine of other equal years to come wiU not efface; standing cold, monstrous, motionless, sUent, sublime, within a distance so short from our parlor car that even the weakest woman or smaUest chUd in it might, by an easy stroU, stand under its ponderous front. Heavens! how smaU, how feeble, how insignificant seemed the engine of our heavy train, with its sobs, and pantings, and puny puffs of power, beside that monstrous creation of ages, that landscape of frozen force, that overhanging world of chained energy which, should Nature ever loosen the chiHed links which chained it to that mountain pass, would sweep our engine, train, and yonder house away Hke chips; ay, crush, grind and pulverize them aU to finest dust, so fine that, were it 268 DAYLIGHT LAND. dry, the winds might lift it as they lift ashes and blow it through the air, invisible to mortal eye. | Never shall it be said," exclaimed the Judge, " that I came to such an environment of majesty as this and passed heedlessly on. Here we wiU stop a day and a nio-ht, and see the sunset splendor and the sunrise glory on these peaks, and the moonfight whiten the surface of that frozen field. There is not ice enough in Switzerland to make that single glacier yonder. Let the train move on. We four have wandered on the earth too widely and seen too many of its wonders not to recognize the extraordinary and do homage to it." And so the train roUed down the grade, around the sweU of the mountain beyond, and left us four gray- headed boys standing above the glacial torrent, gazing and wondering. That afternoon we took the traU — an easy way, which led us to the Glacier's front. Slowly we drew our Hne of progress toward it. The fit mood was on us aU. We were alone, we four. We were intelHgent 5 O enough to appreciate the awful phenomenon. We saw it with the eyes of many years. We could measure it by European comparison. We could weigh it in the scales of world-wide knowledge. Two of us had footed the Alpine passes. One had seen the Himalayas. Another had wintered within the Arctic Circle. Slowly we moved forward. A few rods of motion onward, and we would pause. We were all eyes, aU feehng. We felt we were approaching a fragment of eternity. We were drawing nigh to, and gazing at, a bit of the everlasting. Before us was the work of THE GREAT GLACIER. 269 ages. Here the centuries had stopped. Between these monstrous mountains, Time had come to a fuU halt powerless to go one foot farther. Here before us, with folded wings, white-faced, hoary-headed, his scythe held in his stiffened hands, we saw him stand, a statue of ice. " Older than Rome, older than Egypt, older than Man ! " murmured the Judge solemnly, as he gazed. In front of the Glacier was a great round waU of sand, of cobbles, of bowlders. Its pressure drove downward to the bed rock of the world, and ploughed the surface earth. " This plough ploughs slowly, but it ploughs deep," remarked Colonel Goffe, as he ran his eye along the huge ridge. said the Judge. i Think who steadies it! The sun sank from sight behind the western ridge. The gray shaft of Sir Donald flushed, reddened, then blazed as with fire. From amid the dark firs above us Night softly shook her raven plumage, and feathered us with gloom. Then she spread her sable wings. She soared upward, and the world darkened. Anon she saUed, a vast formation of blackness above the peaks. The skies saw her coming and welcomed her with every window O ** Hghted. The Indian myth was realized. The Raven brooded the world. But the great Glacier amid the gloom stiU showed CT CT whitely. From between the pillars of darkness, from the cavernous blackness of night, it looked forth Hke the face of a dead man from the mouth of a grave. 270 DAYLIGHT LAND. I Older than Night, and hence stronger ! " whispered the Judge. Thus we four sat in the darkness watching and pondering, while through the gloom and the stiUness the glacial torrent at our feet tore its Hne of hoarse noise. I See ! " I exclaimed. | The Glacier is growing whiter. Its paleness begins to brighten. Look! There is a gleam in that upper crevice ! And see — see that flash of white ! " I The moon ! The moon ! " cried the Judge. " The moon is rising. Now we shall see the spectacle of a lifetime!" Excuse me, reader, I cannot write it down. I know the Hmitation of letters. Even could I tint them with aU the colors of the palette, it were in vain. Imagine our position, standing in that gorge, deep, deep down at the very roots of those monstrous mountains, within the inclosure of their awful environment; the stiUness, which the roar of the torrent divided, but did not disturb ; the whole world black with the blackness of night when it smothers the woods out of sight of the CT O eye; the great Glacier in front of us, vast, monstrous, formless, as it lay dimly outlined in the gloom; then imagine it growing, growing, growing upon the sight. See it brighten and widen out into view. See the gleams begin to run over it. See that flash of white fire strike the crest and run crinkling along- o the lofty ridge until it connects the two opposite peaks with a line of living Hght. o o See the crevices gleam and glisten brighter and brighter. Behold the sparkles and flashes of fire start si! .iu I THE GREAT GLACIER. 273 up here and there, at random, flash, shift and fade, and then, as the rounded orb, vast of size, intense, rose majestically above the summit and looked calmly, and, as it seemed, admiringly down upon it, behold, in your imagination, what we saw, — the monstrous mountains darkly forested round about us, between which, wide as a landscape, lay the great Glacier, bathed in soft white radiance from side to side, from base to summit, and a,bove it the dome of the sky, and suspended from it the round moon! " Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge," said the Judge reverently, and we turned slowly from the sublime spectacle before us, and started to pick our way carefully down the trail. We had seen the Glacier ! It was enough. CHAPTER XIV. THE HERMIT OP FRASER CANON. " We are not ourselves, When nature, being1 oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body." E who attempts to describe in words this majestic exhibition of nature, ad- PU vertises his ignorance of the limitation of letters and his lack of artistic discernment. Even the tongue of Pericles, with its perfect command of the Grecian vocabulary, would have faltered and grown dumb had he stood where we stand, and attempted to describe what we see." THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 275 It was the Judge who spoke, as we stood grouped at a point midway between the extremities of the Great Canon. | Nevertheless, there are those who expect me to do it," I remarked, " and wiH hold me at fault if I fail." 1 Never you mind that," responded the Judge, speaking with emphatic earnestness. " Be true to your knowledge of language and your own sense of the fit and the modest. Here is a work of God whose wild- ness and awful sublimity is not only beyond verbal description, but so far beyond it that only scribblers would attempt it. Here is one of the rare exhibitions of the world. Niagara matches it in nature. The Halls of Karnac and the Great Pyramid are to be classed with it among the works of men. I have walked through the one, and camped a week at the base of the other. This exhibition makes me hold my breath. If the world would learn what is here, let them come and see it. How can you describe that mad turmoU of water ? How picture, with your pen, this awful environment of mountains ? Can you portray this terrible gloom, or put upon your pages that far-off gleam of ice on those summits, or send through the leaves of your book the hoarse roar of yonder whirling, thundering flood ? Let your artist attempt it if he must. His faUure wiU demonstrate the powerless- ness of the pen. Victor Hugo himself would close his note-book were he here. Lay down your portfoho, and we wiU sit on this rock, and see the day shrink out of this fearful gorge, and the night push her black columns into it." 276 DAYLIGHT LAND. We four were together. We had left the car at ii. cm m-M Hi**" tiously, as we sat on the ledge, O 7 Yale, and f oUowed the old government road up the canon. The day was warm, and we had decided to camp one night beside the terrible river which flows wide and deep, swift and strong, with rush and hiss and roar as of thunder, between the cliffs which lift their ridges to the stars. "Had the old Greeks known this," said the Judge, senten- gazing at the mad EAGLE PEAK. Bfl THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 279 river, — I they would have made it the entrance to Hades. Here is such a Styx and Acheron as they never dreamed of." " Charon could never have ferried a stream like that," I said, pointing to the whhling water below. " They would have made him go with the current," responded the Judge. " Down with the current that old freighter of souls would have gone, — down between those ledges and through those ghastly heaps of foam, out of sight, with his pale passengers, forever and ever." Nothing beyond this for a long time was said. We sat in sUence, — we four, — aU eyes, aU ears, aU feeling. We heard the roar of the river rise mightily and hoarsely up between the cliffs. It was that of a Hon sounding in the soHtude of the desert or amid the ruins of a tenantless city half buried in desert sand. We saw the light shrink and fade from the gorge as O ^ CD that of life shrinks and fades from the glassing eyes of the dying. We saw the day, palhd with fear, chmb the chffs, as if stricken with terror at the growing gloom below, frantic to reach their tops and rush with headlong haste after the declining sun. We watched O O the gloom spread over the river, and the white of its rage flash fitfully through it as it deepened. We saw the darkness gather and grow dense along the great forested slopes above, and sway out, Hke black fog, from either side of the chasm, until it met the middle air. And then through the smother of gloom we saw the heavens make revelation of glorious globes, of flashing orbs and shining worlds, — proof that above 280 DAYLIGHT LAND. and beyond this awful gorge, this chasm of Chaos, this cave of Night, the universe of law and Hght stUl held its brilliant course and kept its benignant movements wheehng steadUy on. " I trust," said Mr. PeppereU, as he arose from the rock, " that I am not unmindful of these august surroundings, and I shrink from rudely disturbing your reflections, but I confess that I am as hungry as a bear, and if Colonel Goffe wiU help me find some cones I wiH start a fire, and we wiH see what we have in the hamper for supper." What a repast we four old campers had that night! Our fire was kindled on a wide, flat ledge, which projected shghtly over the river. Above us, two giant firs rose loftily. Below us, the river seethed and flashed. Across the whirHng current our campfire buUt its shifting, tremulous shaft of red blood color. O' We broUed a ten-pound salmon which an Indian had speared for us, as we stroUed up the road that afternoon. Our provisions were ample, and we feasted our hunger f uU. And when the meal was made we sat and fed the fire with fresh cones and sticks, and talked, — talked gravely, as men of sense so circumstanced might. " I met with a strange experience here a year ago," said Mr. PeppereU, suddenly, " and one of my motives for taking this journey was to visit this canon and this very spot where we are. As strange an experience as ever befeU a man," he added musingly. O «/ " TeU us of it," cried the Judge, earnestly; " teU us your tale of the canon. We did not visit this awful THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON 281 gorge to sleep, but to see, listen, and feel; and a strange tale told at midnight, amid these surroundings, would be most apropos indeed." " It is not so much a story as an experience," rephed Mr. PeppereU, " strange and wUd enough to suit this spot and hour, and which you can aU share with me if you choose. It wiH be an encore to me, but a novelty to you." " What do you mean ? " interrogated the Judge, in a surprised tone. " I don't understand you, sir." In place of direct reply, Mr. PeppereU said : — " Do you know, Colonel Goffe, that you are sitting on as strange a tablet as the hand of man ever traced before he died, to trouble the world after he died ? " " Jupiter Crickets ! " cried the Colonel, as he jumped to his feet, " what do you mean, Mr. PeppereU ? " " I wiH show you what I mean," he repHed. " And I wiU show you what I found here a year ago. Yes, we wUl go through the same experience together that I went through alone, and you shaU teU me what you think of it; whether he was mad, and how he died, and where he Hes buried? " " Of whom are you talking," cried the Judge, excitedly, for the suddenness with which Colonel Goffe had risen and Mr. PeppereU's mysterious words had excited aU of us. " Man ahve ! of whom are you talk- ing c " Of the Hermit of Fraser Canon," responded Mr. PeppereU; " that is what I caU him, because that is what he caUs himself. Look here," and he began to brush the leaves and moss from the stone upon which 282 DAYLIGHT LAND. Colonel Goffe had been sitting, " what do you make of that ? You are a traUer," and he looked up at me. I Can you translate that sign ? ': And behold, as we looked, we saw chiseled into the ledge the foUowing symbols and figures. " EasUy enough," I responded, as my eye caught the tracing clearly in the Hght of a torch I held over it. " It means, go one hundred and fifty feet in a straight line from this spot towards yonder cliff. Then two hundred feet at nearly right angles to the left; then eighty feet obliquely, and you wiU come to a cabin. The curved lines are only intended to deceive and bewUder. He converted his straight fines into a labyrinth to deceive." I WeU done," exclaimed Mr. PeppereU, " you have read at sight what it took me a week to decipher. By THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 283 chance I built my fire here, and in the Hght of it I saw that rude tracing in the ledge. It puzzled me. It tormented me. It threw me into a fever of curiosity. I studied it for days and nights, and at last I got the cue. Gentlemen, we wiU now do what I did one night, last year. I want you to see this \ cabin ' and what is in it. WiH you come ? " I Certainly," I answered. 1 But, Mr. PeppereU," I continued, a year brings avalanches in this country, and I warrant your * cabin' won't look as when you saw it." a The cabin which that * C' stands for was built by a BuUder whose buUdings never faU. Judge, take those two candles. Colonel Goffe, you carry the lantern. Mr. Murray, you and I wiH take a torch. Here, let me go ahead. I have measured this Hne before." And with this he started carefuUy on, we following. Slowly, with the aid of our Hghted torches, we worked our way toward the cfiff for the one hundred and fifty allotted feet. Then Mr. PeppereU ran the line two hundred feet to the left. His memory had evidently retained a vivid remembrance of the traU, for he hesitated at no point of it. At the end of the two hundred feet he turned obhquely to the left, and the eighty feet brought us to the very front of the gigantic cliff. I Where is your cabin ? " I cried exultantly, not doubting but that a snow sfide had swept it into the Fk aser. " Where is the cabin that the ■ C' stands for on the diagram, Mr. PeppereU ? | "Here it is," he responded promptly. " Look! 284 DAYLIGHT LAND. and he lifted his torch to the face of the cliff and, lo ! there, painted on the front of the rock was a letter " C " ! An exclamation escaped us as we crowded close up to the ledge to inspect it. It was a monstrous letter, at least three feet in its perpendicular length and fuUy two feet across. It was painted in some gray mixture which nearly matched the color of the rock, and was not discernable save upon close inspection. It was enlarged at the back of it, and united at the curved extremities so that it rudely resembled the sheU of a clam even as our artist has drawn it. I What in the world does this mean, sir ? | I exclaimed, looking at Mr. PeppereU. His response to this interrogation was singularly direct and instructive. He took a chisel-shaped instrument from one pocket, and a hammer from another, and placing the edge of the sharp steel at the central point of the letter, where the Hnes connected the extremities, struck it sharply with the hammer, and a section of the rock coincident with the painted form of the letter stirred, and we saw that it was only a cunningly devised door fitted to an aperture in the ledge. I Great heavens ! " I cried, " the C of the diagram by the river does not mean cabin at aU, but a cave ! " " Precisely," returned Mr. PeppereU complacently. " It took me a long time, but I guessed the trick at last. Gentlemen, wiH you enter the hermit's cave ? " And he stepped through the strange door whUe we foUowed. THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 285 The sensation we experienced as we passed through that strangely-contrived entrance and stood in the mysterious apartment can better be imagined than described. We were too astonished at what we saw to say a word. We stood and gazed in sUent amazement at what we beheld revealed by the Hght of lantern, candle, and torch. The cave was of large size, larger than an ordinary chamber. In the centre stood a table strongly con- 286 DAYLIGHT LAND. structed, the legs of which were grotesquely carved. Skill, patience, and artistic cleverness had wrought out its strange and ludicrous designs. On the smooth sur- O o face of it a clown's head was curiously traced, the face of which was indescribably humorous. It was Mirth's own countenance in the act of laughing. The waU of one side was HteraUy covered with portraits of men, animals, and strange pictures born of mad conceit. Here a death's head grinned at us. Below it a culprit was hanging from the gaUows-bar, the face brutal, contorted, and the dangling body horribly flexed, — a dreadful bit of reafistic work to haunt the memory and terrify sleep. In juxtaposition to it was a foundering ship, in the act of going down, the stern already under water, the prow lifted, and men clinging to the rigging. OO o 77 ing " This is horrible " The man was mj said the Judge as he stood gaz- O O ad." | Perhaps," answered Mr. PeppereU. I But look on this side. Hold up your Hghts, aU of you. I want you to get the fuU effect." v O We turned with hands uplifted, holding the Hghts high. CT A canvas. And on the canvas the portrait of a woman. A woman in the full bloom of her lovehness. A brunette. The " Queen of the Creoles " she might have been when Hving, so rich, so ripe, so perfect was she. A vision of female possibility such as floats in the air before the eyes of the opium eater, as he Hes half asleep in his sensuous heaven. Her head was small, shapely, and crowned with braids of glossy black- £»os k THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 287 ness. Her eyes were large, long, softly black, like the star-fighted dusk of a tropical night. Her lips were fuU, curved, slightly parted. The rounded neck and shoulders were modestly revealed, and the bare, perfectly modeled arms were lifted as to a loved one coming to their embrace. The face was fuU of fire, of passion, of expectancy. But, oh, horrible, horrible sight! A dagger was driven to its hilt in her breast! " My God ! " exclaimed the Judge. " This is too dreadful! " and he turned his back to the picture shud- deringly. "What do you make of it? " I asked, as I turned away from the same impulse. " Judge, what do you make of it ? " " Make of it ?" he responded. " It is perfectly clear that that lovely woman was his wife, his love, or his mistress, and she was murdered in the very act of embracing him, and his awful punishment or fate drove him mad. This cave of his is an artistic bedlam, a mad painter's heU." " I think," said Colonel Goffe, " he murdered her himself. He caught her in the act of unfaithfulness, and his hand drove that dagger home. The remembrance of it made him mad." " Gentlemen," said Mr. PeppereU, " seat yourselves around this table. I wish to show you something. I spent a night in this cave, and I discovered some of its secrets." " Why did you not stay and find them all out ? " I asked. " You certainly had made a good start." " Simply because I was afraid to stay longer — afraid 288 DAYLIGHT LAND. I should go mad myself if I did," he answered. | Look at this," and pressing his finger on o o the table, the clown's head flew up and underneath- it was a recess and in the recess was a package of manuscript. "Readthis," he said, and drawing leaf of the manuscript, he handed it to me. was a beautiful bit of artistic embeUishment. THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 289 The text was deficately printed. Each capital letter was ornamented with some lovely or quaint device, whUe around the sheet was a border of vines and flowers beautifuUy executed. It was a metrical composition. Here it is : — FORGOTTEN. I passed the gates of Death, and in the light I looked to see those whom I thought to meet. But none were there. I knew no Ansrel face. They who had gone before, yea even those Who with love's dread of parting from the loved Were torn from out my arms, had found new loves, And now were fixed forever in new lives. They had forgotten me. And there I stood At Heaven's gate, and saw that I must take The old search up to find some faithful one To serve and love me as I had been loved. I could not do it. Nay, I was too faint, Too tired, from the old seeking, out of which I had just come. I turned, and from the gate Called Beautiful I downward went unto Those other gates, within which lies a land All cold and dim, to which those go at wish Who have lost all, and find — forgetfulness. Into this land, cold, dim, and dark, I went, That being thus forgot I might forget. I That's a strange thing," said the Judge. i Here's another," remarked Mr. PeppereU, and he handed me the second sheet. " Read that." I did as requested, and read: — msm rd 290 DAYLIGHT LAND, A VISIT. Beyond the glorious gates I met a soul That on the earth had been betrothed to me. She loved me with the love of time and sense, The love which women give to mortal men, And out of which come births, and later, graves. In joy I ran to her with arms outstretched — Outstretched to fold her in my fond embrace, And with warm lips press kisses on her mouth As I had done in the dear days below. But she with startled eyes stared fuU at me, And speechless stood, as if struck dumb with fright At sight so strange she knew not what it meant. I spoke her name. That name which was to me As sweet as cry of new-born babe to her Who in her pain hears that sure sign of life, And panting feels the joy of motherhood. But she stood coldly still, nor gave a sign That she remembered either name or me. A new name had been given her above. In death she lost one life, another found, And what she found was not as what she lost. She knew not me nor any thing that was. And so I turned and gladly journeyed down To earth and human life and its warm loves. " This is uncanny business, this reading a dead man's private papers without legal permission," remarked the Judge, after we had sat in sUence a moment, tt I feel as if I were one of a party engaged in robbing a grave.' o O THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 291 I Here it is ! here it is! " suddenly exclaimed Mr. PeppereU, as he lifted a smaU package neatly folded from the bottom of the recess. " Read this, Mr. Murray, and then I wUl show you something that wiU startle you," and he passed a portion of the package over to me. I took it from his hand, and, smoothing it out care- fuUy on the table, proceeded to read the foUowing strange communication. The Last Will and Testament OF one whose name is hidden, who alone knows himself, and who is known only unto God AS The Hermit of Fraser Canon. / AM MAD. " The proof of it is on these waUs. What drove me mad is also on these waUs. I kUled her. GuUt is on us both. Her portrait. Love. Conscience. Here have I lived eighteen hundred years with her in torment. The ecstasies of heaven and the agonies of heU have been mine. Ha! ha! ha ! ha! " Yes. I am mad, but I am cunning. My mind never stops. It spins Hke a buzz-wheel. I have more than mortal power. I can Hve without food. I have clairvoyant sight. I can see the bottom of the Fraser. J O It is soHd gold. I can hear through a mountain. O CT II leave my body and visit worlds. I come back and enter it again. I can become incorporeal at wiU. I 292 DAYLIGHT LAND. am an unit of pure consciousness, a receptive essence, an atom of universal apprehension. Amen. " Let bim who would know a mystery read. Let him who would solve it obey. Let him who dare, put his ear to the breast of the woman and listen." I Judge Doe," said Mr. PeppereU, " go to the canvas. Put your ear to it and Hsten. What do you hear ? " I Water," answered the Judge in astonishment. 1 The sound of running water as it plunges over a distant fall and pours softly down among stones," and he returned to his seat on the bench. I read on. " Have you Hstened ? Has the heart of the mountain told you its secret ? Have you heard the river that pours from under the Glacier ? Do you know that its sands are pure gold ; that aU the gold in the Fraser comes down that stream ? I have seen. I have digged my grave on its bank. I shaU sleep, when I die, in a chamber of gold. He who finds me might ? CT O purchase the world. He will have aU that man craves but one thing. He wUl not have love. Hue ! hue ! "' He is mad,' | you who read say. So I am. I know it. But I am cunning. The hidden I found, and what O 7 I found I have hidden. I mock you. I laugh from where I am hidden. My eyes are on you. I am near, a foot away, a yard distant, a span off. Why don't you find me ? I am grinning at you at this moment. Ho ! ho ! " THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 293 " This is the raving of madness," I exclaimed. " I wiU read no more of the trash," and I threw the sheet on the table. "Read to the end," cried Mr. PeppereU. "Read to the end of it, then I wiH show you something." Thus urged I read on. "Are you wise? Are you brave? Are you cunning? Can you read a riddle that is plain? Then read the riddle that I write on the page that comes next." "Make of it? Nothing," I answered. "The man "Here it is," cried Mr. PeppereU. "Here is the page that comes next, and on it the madman's riddle. Who can read it? " A white sheet of paper, blankly white, that was aU ! " What can you make of it ? " It was Mr. PeppereU that put the question. was mad." " Wait a moment," he said. " Now look! " and lifting the blank sheet he held one of the candles under it a moment, and out of the white blankness started this sentence in letters red as blood. " He who calls these letters forth calls me from my grave ! I am here with you ! " And he dropped the sheet, across whose white surface stretched the red Hues, upon the table. We were on our feet like a flash — we three who had been sitting — on our feet, staring at the red letters, and at Mr. PeppereU, and at each other. I! 294 DAYLIGHT LAND. " Gentlemen," he said, " I got thus far a year ago and stopped. I was alone, remember, and I went out of this cave like a scared boy. But I am not alone tonight, and I stay it through, whether Hving or dead come. Wait! " Was it a sound? Yes. It was a sound. The sound of one moving. Or was it the wind outside ? Which? We held our breaths, Hstening. My heart sounded, as it beat in my breast, like a beU. I The canvas ! the canvas ! The woman is moving from the wall," whispered the Judge hoarsely, and his face whitened to the color of chalk. I This is nonsense," I said, pulling myself together stoutly, but my veins shriveled horribly, and the roots of my hair prickled in my scalp. " This is nonsense. It was the wind that did it," and I took a quick step forward and plucked the canvas with a jerk from the waU. i My God ! " It was the Judge's voice, and I heard him drop heavily on to the bench. Back of the canvas stood a man ! The madman himself ! He was grinning insanely at us. And then, with a yeU, he jumped fuU at me. The table was overturned and every Hght extinguished. We were not cowards, nor were we proof against such a shock. We acted, I presume, as any four men would naturaUy act whose senses had been thus suddenly and frightfully assaulted. We probably aU yeUed — I don't know — I know I did, as I jumped backward. "M THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 295 No man Hving could have stood unmoved such a revelation as the faU of that canvas made. The first thought that came to me, in the recoU of feeling and resultant return of sense, was for Hght. I felt for my matches and struck one mechanicaUy. Mr. PeppereU kindled a fusee at the same instant. We Hghted the candles, then the lantern, and for a moment stood looking at each other. " See! " said Mr. PeppereU, as he pointed at the hole in the waU where the canvas had hung. It was an aperture in the side of the cavern; a large, oblong crevice in the cliff; the entrance to an interior passage which led deeper into the mountain. " The riddle is solved any way, Mr. PeppereU," I said. " It was no ghost, but a man. He shpped as he jumped at me and struck the floor like a good sohd human being. O See. There is blood on the leg of the table. He hit it head on. The Hermit of Fraser Canon is not dead. He is some escaped maniac. There is neither truth nor reason in his words or acts. That portrait is a He. I don't befieve he ever kiHed a woman or knew one that was kiUed. It is all a mad fancy of his, an insane delusion. What do you say, Colonel Goffe ? " "I — I don't befieve he ever saw a woman in his life," said the Man from New Hampshire, dryly. Strange that a single sentence neither wise nor very witty could affect us so happUy, but that Hght remark of the Colonel acted as a sedative to our excited nerves. It brought us to our senses and normal condition. We were aU ourselves again. 296 DAYLIGHT LAND. " Come," said the Judge. " Take the papers, Mr. Murray, and let us get out of this. Now that we know what this hole in the mountain is, I feel as if I were in the ceU of some lunatic asylum. I wiH roU up the canvas and bring it along. It may help us discover who he is, or where his friends are. We must find the poor feUow if we raUy the country and hunt him a month. It is plainly a case of insanity. He is a scholar and an artist, but overwork or some accident has driven him mad. It is a pity that the blow he received when he feU did n't stun him. It would have saved us much searching." We did as the Judge suggested, and left the cave much refieved in our feelings and weU content with the outcome of our strange adventure. But we had not come to the end of it. It was to be a night of sur- prises in fact, and the biggest, one yet awaited us. For, as we drew near the flat ledge by the river, our camp- fire was burning brightly and a man was sitting by it bathing his face in some water. It was the madman of the cave ! " Gentlemen," he said, addressing us as we approached, " I am an artist. I was sketching the Canon by moonlight, and shpping, feU from a ledge. I got here with great difficulty. I do not remember how, for I struck my head against a sharp rock as I feU, and was partially stunned. I saw your camp-fire and crawled to it, and have taken the Hberty of using one of your napkins to free my face from blood." This was spoken in a feeble voice, but accurately and ration- aUy, and we instantly realized that the blow he had THE HERMIT OF FRASER CANON. 297 received on his head as he jumped from the wall in the cave had restored him the use of his faculties, but left the time between his accident and his recovery a blank. " I am something of a surgeon," I said pleasantly, " and with your permission I wUl assist you to dress your wound," and I stepped to his side. " You are very kind," he returned feebly, " very kind. I am grateful to God that the accident happened where it did, so near your camp, for I am f eeling very weak, and I could not have crawled far. It was very foohsh of me to spend a night alone in this Gorge, but its sub- Hmities attracted me irresistibly. I feel it is destined to be noted the world over and I longed to be the first CT to put on canvas a moonfight and sunrise view of it. If this blow should prove serious," he continued more feebly, looking up into my face as I was carefuUy removing the hair from the edges of the gash, "my studio is in New Orleans. I have no relatives in this country but my betrothed," and here a sfight flush came to his face. " My betrothed is a lady of that city, a Miss De Fontaine " — I He has fainted," I said quietly. " Colonel Goffe, pour me a spoonful from your brandy flask." ^AA-A*Ai:J^z£^.--*-A --.-t.-;^—* ~aaa fowategSa&ffSgr^ ^sjS CHAPTER XV. FISH AND FISHING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. " The wealth of ■waters.' E were aU anglers, and our journey through British Columbia from the Shuswap Lake region to Vancouver was fuU of the keenest interest to us. We crossed the Columbia three hundred and seventy miles from Vancouver and entered Eagle Pass, which opens a way through the Gold Range, amid magnificent scenery. The vaUey is crowded with forest trees of giant size and of many varieties, which enrich the landscape with a splended arboreous appearance. The train rolls past lovely lakes, whose limpid waters stretch from base to base of the opposite mountains, and suggest to the FISH AND FISHING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. 299 tourist the beautiful lochs of Scotland. Beyond, are the great Shuswap Lakes, to which sportsmen from aU parts of the continent are destined to come. At Sica- mous, hunting parties can find accommodation and make their arrangements to enjoy the sport easUy accessible from it as a starting point. The northward- going traUs wiH conduct them to the caribou grounds, and to the south deer are found in abundance. Geese and ducks in their season abound in these lakes, whose great extent, beautiful shores, and accessibihty commend them to the great fraternity of rod and gun. These bodies of inland water are fed by torrents and mountain streams, but are themselves tranquU, spreading out.in placid reaches of great extent between the surrounding hills. Hundreds of miles of delightful O O boating can be found on these sheets of water, and the region around them is sufficiently settled and cultivated O i/ to easUy furnish suppfies. But the vast region around about these lakes is whoUy unexplored or essentiaUy so, and he who loves adventure in an unknown country can be accommodated to any extent. I hope these words wiH prompt many young and vigorous sportsmen to visit this charming and most attractive section of the continent, now made so easy of approach to them, and that from them I may, with aU who love the outdoor Hfe, receive spirited descriptions of this now almost whoUy unvisited region. The fish supply in the rivers and the coast waters of British Columbia is simply beyond estimate. No one who has not visited the country and seen with his own eyes can credit the most conservative statement of it. ■.Wl 300 DAYLIGHT LAND. In the Fraser River the tourist beholds a phenomenal condition to which there is no paraUel in any other section of the continent or in any other land. Only in the Columbia River does the Fraser find a rival. Five species of salmon frequent this river, and in incredible numbers. In many of the tributaries of it they HteraUy pack the water sofid from bank to bank. FISH AND FISHING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. 301 The pools resembled purse nets when filled to the floats. In the Canon of the Fraser in summer months milHons of these fish can be seen from the car windows, packed into the eddies of the torrent stream or resting O in the lee of rocks and projections, gathering strength for another rush upward through the tremulous water. It is a novel and picturesque sight for the tourist to gaze at. AU along the banks, and on the projecting rocks stands the Indian, spear in hand; he suddenly rises to his full height, his sinewy arms, bared to the shoulder, gleaming in the sun, and from his nervous grasp is launched his salmon spear. Well aimed, surely sent! A struggle, a splashing, and a glistening fish is lifted from the water and Hes, sUvery white, on the brown ledge at the spearman's feet. First of aH in the spring comes up the sUver salmon, a beautiful fish to look upon and often of magnificent size, varying from five to seventy pounds. Their run begins in March and lasts untU the last of June. Then come a smaU species, but greatly prized, averaging about five pounds in weight. Their flesh is brightly pink. This is the kind that is most sought for canning purposes. They run from June untU August. Next in order is an exceUent variety, much esteemed, averaging some seven pounds in weight. Then comes an anomaly among salmon, the " noan " or " humpbacked," whose run lasts from August into winter, but which visits the river but once in two years! And last of aU, in September the " hook- biU " appears, a fish that weighs as high as twenty-five pounds, and disappears at Christmas. Such is the fist WBB 302 DAYLIGHT LAND. of the Fraser River salmon and their characteristics, and no party of ladies and gentlemen could have a more novel and enjoyable I experience than they might obtain by camping a week or a month near the Great Canon of the Fraser River at Yale, in the months of July, August, and September, when the gold seekers are wash- FISH AND FISHING LN BRITISH COLUMBIA. 303 ing the sand on the bars, and the Indians are spearing salmon in the whirlpools and rapids of the Canon. If a party camped amid such scenery and novel surroundings did not find rare enjoyment, it would be because of something inherently depraved or cross-grained in their constitutions. I speak with deliberation when I say that I know not one locaHty on the continent I would so quickly select for a party of intelhgent and congenial people to camp a few weeks as the Canon of the Fraser. It is the one spot of aU others for the amateur photographer and the artist to visit, and it would be a real benefit to the lovers of nature in its sublime and strange aspects to have put within their reach pictorial presentations of this awful chasm. In addition to the salmon, the fresh-water streams and lakes abound with game fish. Whitefish, salmon trout, brook trout, and big lake trout are found in abundance everywhere. A rodsman can find prime sport wherever he goes through the province, whether among the inland lakes and rivers or along the coast O CT waters. There is no other stretch of coast on the globe along which, and in the rivers flowing into it, so many varieties of edible fish are caught as off the shore and in the streams of British Columbia. Beside the salmon and trout are the hafibut, the cod, the mackerel, the haddock, the rock cod, the flounders, and that deficious tidbit of marine deficacy, the oola- han or candle fish. This Httle fish is of the size of a sardine and has a flavor peculiarly its own, so piquant and deficate as to justify its claim of being, par excellence, an epicurean morsel. Prepared for the plate fresh from the water, it is exceedingly delicious, while IBS 304 DAYLIGHT LAND. its oU is said to be preferable to cod-Hver oil for medicinal purposes. These fish are supposed to come from far northern waters, and they come in numberless quantities. They enter the Fraser about the first of May, and swarm up its current as bees swarm in a hive. The herrings of the coast are equaUy numberless. These are somewhat smaUer than those found along the shores of Labrador and the British Isles, but as food are fully as good as those caught in the waters of the Atlantic. It is only when one adds to the fish supply of eastern Canada the even larger one of British Columbia, that the value of the Canadian fisheries to herself and the world can be reafized. .L DRYING CANDLE FISH. Hi fc.'./t-jviiVv*' CHAPTER XVI. VANCOUVER. HAT San Francisco was once, Van couver is now, — an oak within an acorn, a vital root weU placed, but only just sprouted; but aU the conditions of a great city are here, and here a great city is to be. Colonel Goffe, I wiH buy this corner lot if you wiH take the opposite one, or I will toss for the choice. What say you ? " It was Mr. PeppereU who spoke. I Judge, you pitch for us," repfied the Man from New Hampshire, laconicaUy. Up went the cent, and as it came down and roUed curving through the dust, \mm 308 DAYLIGHT LAND. the two speculators chased it, laughing Hke boys, to see who had won the lot on which we were standing. " WeU, weU," exclaimed the Judge, as the two men scuffled over the penny, " you are genuine Yankees, and you type both the shrewdness and recklessness of our countrymen, who buy bits of the continent as brokers do stocks, and purchase locations as gamblers do chips. One might fancy that you think you are standing on the site of a future Chicago by the way you are acting." " You old Areopagite," exclaimed Mr. PeppereU, as he wrestled with the Colonel for the token. " We don't think any such thing, but we know that fifty thousand people wiU have their homes here on this peninsula within twenty years, and we know that two big buildings wiU stand on these corner lots inside of a year, for we wiH buUd them ourselves." " How do you figure that out ? " retorted the Judge. <J O O " This is n't Yankee land, remember, and Canadians move slowly." "Judge Doe," responded Mr. PeppereU, as he let go his hold on the Colonel, and sobered down, " we have been in this city two days. The Colonel and I have been canvassing this place, and we have sized up the outlook to a shaving. The conditions which make for success are aU here. In the first place the men who have founded this city have the right stuff in them. There is n't a slow drop of blood in their veins. They are not a gang of mere speculators. They are gentlemen of substance and character, and they have come to stay. They have put in their money, thou- TOSSING FOR CORNER LOTS. pn VANCOUVER. 311 sands and thousands of it. Look at these sofid blocks of stone and brick, at that opera house, at that hotel which must have cost nigh on to a quarter of a mU- Hon; look at their gas works and water works, their steam fire-engines, their mUes of paved streets and sidewalks, that magnificent driving park, with its splendid boulevard clear around it, their boating club and athletic grounds, those fines of wharves and yonder huge steamships loading and unloading at them. \Boomers \ and land gamblers don't do such work as these men have done here. They are Americanized Canadians, sir, the best city builders on the continent, for they buUd with the sofidity of the EngHsh and the celerity of the Yankee. Colonel Goffe, you viHain you, which lot am I to take ? If there was the difference of a doUar between them, I would have you up before the peripatetic court that travels around with us and compel you to disgorge." Vancouver — the city, I mean, not the huge island of that name lying thirty miles out in the Pacific, and stretching three hundred mUes northward like a great natural breakwater, as it is, along the coast — Vancouver is a city site, HteraUy hewn out of the sofid forest, which, with its gigantic timber trees, makes the sea front of British Columbia. And what a forest it is! An Eastern born man knows nothing of it unless he has crossed the continent and actuaUy seen it, nor can he conceive of it, for the woods of the East supply him with no standard of comparison ; even the largest pines of Michigan give him only a hint of what this mighty forest of the Pacific coast reaUy is. The trees 312 DAYLIGHT LAND. stand from two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in height, and so densely packed together that progress among them is absolutely impossible. Large tracts are actuaUy destitute of game because of the density of this forest growth. Here is a lumber supply for the whole world for centuries to come. As a source of future wealth to the country, its value cannot be overestimated. The market for this lumber is found in Japan, in China, in Austrafia, in San Francisco, in local development, and in that measureless demand which the prairies, only five hundred mUes to the east, wiU make upon it when they are peopled with their milHons, as they soon wiU be, and cities Hke Minneapolis and St. Paul and Duluth stand on the great water-courses which thread the Mackenzie Basin with VANCOUVER. 313 possibUities of inland commerce, and steel pathways connect them with Lake Superior, or straight eastward, south of James's Bay, with the Saguenay, at Chicou- thni. Place the minerals, the fish, the coal, and the forests of British Columbia in the one scale, and how many millions of doHars, do you fancy, you wiH have to pUe into the opposite scale to bring the bar level? No intelfigent American ever visited this Pacific province of Canada, and saw what it contains, and did not grind his teeth as he recaUed how the miserable, blundering, partisan poHtics of the Polk regime, lost it to the Great RepubHc. Let any statesman who loves his country and is proud of its vast geographical extent and future greatness, take a map of the Pacific coast and see what a gap this one province of the Dominion JiPWB m 314 DAYLIGHT LAND. makes in its western sea line, — longer by far than the Atlantic coast from the Florida Keys to Cape Breton. And, verUy, what did the Polk administration do to make amends to the American people for this criminal blunder ? Had Polk's secretary of state secured British Columbia for us as Seward secured Alaska, — weU, things would now be a good deal different from what O O they are, would n't they ? The RepubHc has been taxed pretty heavUy to support her petty pofiticians and miserable partisan poHtics, truly. Out of such a forest, as we said, a site for Vancouver City has been hewn. It cost three hundred doHars per acre to merely feU and burn the gigantic growth. When we arrived, only two trees were stiH standing, vand they were burning Hke a blast furnace inside their hoHow trunks. They were nearly three hundred feet in height and measured between thirty and forty feet in circumference. For one hundred and fifty feet they rose like mammoth piUars of wood, straight as a plumb line, bare of branch or knot. Our artist sketched them on the spot only an hour before they fell with a sweep, a rush, and a roar of sound as if the columns which uphold the sky had sfipped from their bases and a section of heaven had dropped suddenly — a vast ruin — to the earth. The earth trembled to the shock of their overthrow, the air groaned, and as the roar of their faU rolled across the level water of Burrard's Inlet, through the stUl air, the mountains beyond sent back the murmurs of their regret. Alas, that life must forever feed its growth on death, and human progress advance only over the ruins of the perfect! CEDAR, VANCOUVER PARK: 50 FEET IN CIRCUMFERENCE. ^1 VANCOUVER. 317 They fell, and the saws went at them. How their senseless, hungry, cruel teeth ate into and destroyed the majesty of their sublime proportions ! We turned away, from a sense of pain and sheer vexation. In the evening the Judge and I crept up through the debris and heavy semi-tropical undergrowth to the crown of the hiU on which they had stood. The warm evening air was filled with a ruddy glow, for a hundred giant stumps were stiH feebly gasping forth fire, lighted two resinous torches and counted the rings which would give us o o the measure of their age. " Six hundred and seven- ptSllli^ ty-four years old I " gasped the Judge, and he dropped his torch to the ground. " My God ! these trees were 318 DAYLIGHT LAND. older than the landing of Columbus, older than Magna Charta, older than the first translation of the Bible into EngHsh, and last week they stood with a thousand years of Hfe ahead of them, and these men of Vancouver have leveUed them to the earth with as Httle sense of what they were doing as the Vandals had when they overturned the immortal sculptures of Rome, and trampled the triumphs of art under the hoofs of their chargers ! It is simply brutal. But the trees wiH have long and sure revenge." " How is that ? " I queried, as I flung my torch away in rage at what had been done, for I shared the indignation of my companion. " How wUl these thoughtless people be punished for this wanton deed ? " I Mr. Murray," cried the Judge in reply, " Boston would give a milHon of doHars to have two such trees, growthful and strong with six centuries of growth and ten centuries of Hfe ahead of them on her Common. What would London give for two such monuments ? What Paris ? Had these Vancouver men had the reverence or wit to have set apart a space six hundred feet across for a smaU park on this knoU, — the very centre and crown of their city, that is to be, — they would have made it the Mecca of thousands upon thousands of visitors each year. That railroad there could have afforded to pay a milfion of doUars to have kept these two gigantic trees, these majestic monuments of past centuries, buUt up from the soU, the air, and the sunshine, by the Lord, standing here. There is not a sculpture, shaft, or fresco in Rome, that can compare with these trees as they stood but yesterday TJ c o o o c m x m VANCOUVER. 321 in their attractiveness to the eyes and the imagination of men. These trees thus preserved would have made their city one of the noted cities of the world. Every pen that came hither would have written of them; every pencU have sketched them; every brush made them the foreground of this magnificent view; every tongue told of them to listening ears far away. The Bank of England put at their disposal could not buy for them such an advertisement as these two trees gave them free of cost. And now they lie in these hot ashes lost to the world forever, burning as if they were an offense to the eye, a stench to the senses, a coUection of offal. What a pity, what a loss ! Come, let us get away from this spot. The air is filled with the reproach of the centuries that look upon their highest artistic result as despised and rejected of men. I shall always think of Vancouver as I should of Rome if St. Peter's were destroyed by a mob." It was not until we had returned to the hotel, and the Judge had seated himself at a table in the supper room, that he regained his wonted spirits. The vast and elegant hostelry was fiUed with happy noises, for a band of stringed instruments was playing and fifty couples were whirling through the mazes of a waltz, while the low buzz of conversation in the wide corridors, and now and then a peal of merry laughter mingled pleasantly with the strains of music. It was in truth a bright and animated scene, and one most suggestive withal. I This is a most astonishing spectacle," remarked the Judge, as we sat on one of the wide verandas of O 7 mm 322 DAYLIGHT LAND. the great house, gazing through the wide open windows at the merry dancers whirling around the large haU within. " Two years ago this city site was covered with a mighty forest, so dense that even a bear could scarcely thread a way through it, and now behold what is here, — blocks of brick and stone, wide streets, pavements echoing to the tread of a thousand feet, gas, electric Hghts, green swarded lawns, fountains, flowers, and a fashionable hop in a hotel that cost a quarter of a million of money. That train rolling into the depot yonder has two coaches in it filled with Bostonians. Massachusetts Bay sends its greeting to Burrard's Inlet. What would not San Francisco have given for raU connection with the Atlantic, when her census counted only seven thousand. And what an impetus such a connection would have given to her development. Mr. PeppereU, this is an age of enchantment, as you say. The wand of measureless power is being waved over this continent, and no man can predict the rate of its progress in civilization. This in truth is the day when old men can dream dreams and our young men behold visions. We Americans and our Canadian neighbors must join hands and keep them joined in strong fraternal clasp. We are brethren. The continent geo- graphicaUy is a unit, and we who shape its development in wealth and population must shape it along the fines of affectionate union. The Lord of it wUl smite us in his wrath if we do otherwise. The moonfight on yonder mountains and the music might well keep us from sleep, but we must start fresh as boys for Victoria to-morrow, and hence the couch must be honored. THE BALL. VANCOUVER. 325 Gentlemen, I wish you good night, restful sleep, and pleasant dreams." And we stroUed away to our rooms. Dear old, courteous, wise, happy-hearted Judge — a gentleman, that highest of titles — thy face is a picture which the memory of three men wiH keep until aU bright pictures fade and aU sweet earthly things are forgotten, if they ever shaU be. Who knows ? ~-^>w*mmmm£M •"pt* CHAPTER XVn. THE PARTING AT VICTORIA. HESE are not Indians," said the Judge, as we stood on the bridge at Victoria, looking down upon a dozen Siwash canoes filled with their strange looking owners. " These are not Indians," he repeated, " they are MongoHans." " And look at their boats," exclaimed Mr. PeppereU; " they have n't the least resemblance to a birch-bark canoe. They suggest the Chinese junks, rather. Observe their length, narrowness, and high, projecting prows." " Not a bad boat for a heavy sea," I remarked. " That one putting off from the shore must be forty K "«»'> o m Rsfe- BB di L.4- THE PARTING. 329 feet long, and with her twenty paddles, and weU steered, would chmb safely over a mighty big sweU, for she sits as Hghtly on the water as if made of bamboo." ' "Look there," cried Mr. PeppereU, pointing to a boat just coming into sight from under the bridge. ° O O CT I That is the Medicine Man of the tribe, and his wife." " WeU," said the Colonel, " I am a great admirer of the ladies, but I must confess that Mrs. Medicine Man does n't impress me as being a great beauty. What do you say, Judge ? " "This is a very strange spectacle," responded the Judge; " a very strange spectacle, indeed. I have seen many queer looking people, but I have never seen a more singular looking folk than these Siwash Indians. EthnologicaUy, I don't know where to place them." It was a strange spectacle in truth. The river was covered with their long, Hght, narrow craft. Some were shooting rapidly along in straight courses, some drifting with the tide, others grouped side by side. The tribe were preparing to move off on a fishing excursion, and the low soft murmur of many voices filled the air. AU was activity, but there was no bustle, no confusion, no sharp word of command or loud calls. A pretty sight they made as they moved away, a long procession of strange looking boats, each trailing exactly in Hne of the one ahead of it, the paddles rising and falling in concert, the blue water beneath them O ' and their high-colored blankets showing brightly in the sun. " Bon voyage ! Bon voyage ! " cried the Judge to them as the last canoe passed from under the bridge on which we stood, and ghded away. 330 DAYLIGHT LAND. The steersman, an old wrinkled Siwash, who was standing in the stern of the craft, looked up at the Judge and smUed ; at least his leathery face was suddenly cut up into wrinkles, and his toothless gums showed between his parted Hps. I That was n't a bad grin, Judge," said the Man from New Hampshire. " EthnologicaUy I should place that old specimen of Siwash antiquity halfway between a low-bred Mongohan and a high- O O bred ape. Darwin should have come to Victoria for his * connecting link.' Victoria is well worth seeing. The tourist can find entertainment there. He can pick up a quantity of interesting curios and not be swindled in so doing. We four spent the day, happy-hearted as boys in their first journey from home. Life brings many losses to us, as we five, but none greater than the loss of the boyish eye and heart. He who keeps these, long after his head is white, has prolonged the finest pleasures of life. What a day we four gray- headed boys had at this most western city of our race, thrust out from the continent Hke a picket in front of an encamped army. We visited the fish market and saw how royaUy the city was fed by the sea, — salmon, trout, hafibut, haddock, cod, the dehcious oolahan or candle fish, and a ,«&- THE PARTING. 331 dozen sorts, some of them new to us. In one market we found a huge octopus or devU-fish suspended for advertisement, a ghastly creature, with tentacled arms nine feet in stretch. The Italians and Chinese eat them. And the marketman assured us that 1 octopus steak was n't bad eating." I Let me get out of this place," cried the Judge, shudderingly, I or I shaU not eat a mouthful of dinner to-day." I That devU-fish," said the Man from New Hampshire, " does make a man feel a little creepy inside, does n't it, Judge ? " We visited stores where furs and skins are bought of the Indians, and the warehouses where they are packed. What a coUection of furs we saw! And there aU, save one of us, saw for the first time that finest, rarest fur of the. world, the magnificent sea otter. Did you ever see one, mada me No ? What pleasure you have awaiting you ahead. Wait until your white fingers can feel their way through the fur of a sea otter ! Ah, me, beaver wUl never content you after that. We visited all the pawnshops, and in them discovered many curious bits brought from the four corners of the earth, — Japan, China, Austraha, New Zealand, the two Indies, the Arctic Ocean, Mexico, and Palestine, aU had MM 332 DAYLIGHT LAND. contributed to the unique coUections. Strange pipes, antique arms, nuggets of gold, pearls, rude coins, Indian armor deftly quilted. Grotesque masks, flaming head-dresses, and skins from every furred animal of the continent. In one shop we were shown an Oriental ruby, the iridescent splendors of which were beyond aU conception. THE PARTING. 333 " A stone," said the Judge, " to be set in the gate of heaven." That describes it. Then there were specimens of Indian workmanship, carved plates and salvers of jet black stone, valued at a hundred doHars each; birds and fish and national banners fashioned in pure gold, exquisitely wrought; baskets, woven from the fibres of roots, in which water can be boUed; juvenUe toys in wicker in loveliest of colors; bows and arrows from polished bone, tipped with stone or steel, dipped in deadfiest poisons ; gambling sticks and conjurers' robes, and a hundred and one odd things, novel and most instructive to civilized people, — how much we saw and how much we enjoyed it aU. What a day we four tourists had at Victoria ! Thus pleasantly passed the day, and pleasantly it drew to its close. We were standing on the battery south of the city, as it declined. In front of us the water stretched away, level as a floor, — a wide emerald plain with the shifting colors of sunset playing over it, coming and going, deepening and fading. To the east and south we saw the snowy peak of Mount Baker. To the west the red sun was going slowly downward, carrying aU its splendors into the great ocean whose farther waves were rolling in white far up on orient beaches. We had come to the end of our journey. It had been, as the Judge had predicted at the start, a happy one to us aU, and with happy hearts we were ready to turn our faces toward our distant homes. What a revelation it had been to us! The Judge was to take boat to the Golden Gate, and we escorted him on board, anxious to be with one whose mmm 334 DAYLIGHT LAND. inteUigence and urbanity had ministered so much to our entertainment as we journeyed, to the last moment. "Gentlemen," said the Judge, "this winter you must all come to San Francisco, and be my guests; we wiH do California, Mexico, and Arizona, together. Next summer, Mr. PeppereU, you shaU be our host for a "P-**5^**^*.' week, and we wiU eat beans with you at the Somerset Club. By that time we can buy tickets through to Yokohama and Hong Kong, and see the West and the East, both hemispheres, and the youngest and oldest civilization in the world side by side in one trip. Such opportunities of pleasure and profit mankind have never enjoyed before since the race was born. What say you, gentlemen, shaU we go over and see the land of the Celestials next summer ? " I Judge Doe," answered Colonel Goffe, " when the golden sands of California caU, the rich soU of New Hampshire wiH respond. I wiU buy a raUroad ticket to any spot in this world, or the next, you may suggest, provided it gives me your company. Only let us have THE PARTING. THE PARTING. 337 Jack Osgood along with us, for he and I are bound to pick up a Httle paying investment, occasionaUy, wherever we go, unless different arrangements prevaU there from what we have in New Hampshire," and then, lifting his beaver, the taU, gray-headed Yankee, born trader and traveUer, type of that energy and courage which have threaded their strength and color into the warp and woof of the continent, and whose shrewd remarks and quaint, rippling humor had been half the life of the party, led us off in that royal old bit of loving sentiment, — I Should auld acquaintance be forgot And never brought to mind ? Should auld acquaintance be forgot And days of auld Lang Syne ? " We sang it bravely, we four gray-headed men, standing on the deck of the steamer with the purple light of the early gloaming upon us. Nor did we sing it far as a quartette ; for on the deck were other wanderers like ourselves, far from friends and home, and among them a group of Scottish immigrants, red-haired, rough- bearded, and who were as responsive to the first note of the grand old stave as powder is to the spark, and whose strong voices, with their broad accent, joined in with such a rush and roar of sound as the Camp- beUs brought with them when they charged into O ** CT Lucknow. At the close ? Well, there were tears in our eyes. You need n't laugh, young man. Wait tiU you get on toward your evening, and know what home, country, 338 DAYLIGHT LAND. and partings mean. You wUl never laugh then at the noble moistening of eyes. As I came off the boat I ran against a big AustraHan who had just parted at the gate with his wife. I Beg pardon," he said, " I did n't see you coming." " I beg your pardon," I returned, " I did n't see you either." Then we looked at each other, and we both saw why we had not seen ! WORKS BY W. H. H. MURRAY. mm. DAYLIGHT LAND. The Experiences, Incidents, and Adventures, Humorous and Otherwise, which befell Judge John Doe, Tourist, of San Francisco I Mr. Cephas Pepperell, Capitalist, of Boston ; Colonel Goffe, the Man from New Hampshire, and divers others, in their Parlor-Car Excursion over Prairie and Mountain ; as recorded and set forth by W. H. H. Murray. Superbly illustrated with 150 cuts in various colors by the best artists. Contents: Introduction — The Meeting—A Breakfast—A Very Hopeful Man — The Big Nepigon Trout — The Man in the Velveteen Jacket — The Capitalist — Camp at Rush Lake — Big Game — A Strange Midnight Ride — Banff—Sabbath among the Mountains—Nameless Mountains — The Great Glacier — The Hermit of Frazer Canon— Fish and Fishing in British Columbia— Vancouver — Parting at Victoria. 8vo, 338 pages. Unique paper boards, $2.50; gilt, $4.00. cloth, $3. to; cloth, full Mr. Murray has chosen the northwestern side of the continent for the scene of this book ; a region of country which is little known by the average reader, but which in its scenery, its game, and its vast material and undeveloped resources supplies the author with a subject which has not been trenched upon even by the magazines, and which he has treated in that lively and spirited manner for which he is especially gifted. The result is a volume full of novel information of the country, humorous and pathetic incidents, vivid descriptions of its magnificent scenery, shrewd forecasts of its future wealth and greatness when developed, illustrated and embellished with such lavishness and artistic elegance as has never before been attempted in any similar work in this country. The Critic, in a recent issue, receiving the illustrated edition of Daudet's " Robert Helmont," says, " We wonder if the time will ever come when the creations of our own writers will be interpreted with equal sympathy," and, in view thereof, we would respectfully submit the above book to the critics and the public at large in evidence that the long-desired time has now arrived. CUPPLES AND HURD, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON, MASS. For other books, see next page. ADIRONDACK TALES. By W. H. H. MURRAY. Illustrated. i2mo, 300 pages, $1.25. CONTENTS. Was it Suicide ? The Gambler's Death. The Old Beggar's Dog. The Ball. Who was he ? John Norton's Christmas. Henry Herbert's Thanksgiving. A Strange Visitor. Lost in the Woods. A Jolly Camp. Comment on these seem almost superfluous, so well are they known and appreciated. The quaintness and upright sturdiness of John Norton, the weird " Strange Visitor," the solemnity of " The Gambler's Death " in the very heart of nature, the deep pathos of | The Old Beggar's Dog," the spontaneous jollity of | The Ball," the mystery of " Was it Suicide ?" and " Who was he ? " all appeal most powerfully to our many-facetted nature. And over all, and in all, and through all, is the charm of Mr. Murray's individuality expressed in his unique style. Critics have in vain endeavored to define that quality in a book which renders it appreciated by every reader; we all know that it exists, but it eludes all effort to crystallize it into a phrase. These stories are full of that subtle charm, and their daily increasing popularity abundantly testifies to the fact. ADVENTURES IN THE WILDERNESS; Or, Camp Life in the Adirondack^. By W. H. H. MURRAY. Illustrated. 12 mo, $1.25. CONTENTS. Introduction. CHAP. 1. The Wilderness. 2. The Nameless Creek. 3. Running the Rapid. 4. The Ball. 5. Loon-Shooting in a Thunder-Storm. CHAP. 6. Crossing the Carry. 7. Rod and Reel. 8. Phantom Falls. Jack-Shooting in a Foggy Night. Sabbath in the Woods. A Ride with a Mad Horse in a Freight Car. 9- 10. 11. This book, originally published twenty years ago, is now republished in response to repeated general inquiries. Many will, remember its immense popularity at the time of its first issue, when it practically directed the attention of the American public to an unknown section of their country ; and earned for the author the sobriquet of " Adirondack" Murray. Distinguished as an orator, he then introduced to the reading world those wonderful gifts of descriptive writing, genuine humor and pathos, and complete sympathy with Nature in her various moods, which have now become so well known, and this work will ever be found fresh and breezy, picturesque and amusing, besides being one of the best guide-books extant to the wonderful and beautiful region of which it treats. & OBrief OBiograpJ^ OF W. H. H. MURRAY. W. H. H. Murray was born in 1840 at Guilford, Connecticut. His earliest characteristic was love of books. He was born with a passion for knowledge. Before entering college and during his course he studied poetry and belles-lettres under Fitz- Greene Halleck, the poet, with whom he was a great favorite. Mr. Murray was graduated from Yale in the class of '62. While at Yale, he was, above all else, a reader of books. His memory was extraordinary, and he seemed incapable of forgetting. A book once read was his at call forever. The great object of all his reading and study was his native tongue. He mastered English literature from beginning to date. He read everything ; he read critically, and he never forgot what he read. After his graduation he studied theology at East Windsor and under private teachers. His first engagement as preacher was as assistant to Dr. Edward Hatfield, D. D., New York City. This engagement terminated with Dr. Hatfield's resignation. He then served at Washington, Litchfield Co., Conn.; Greenwich, Conn. ; Meriden, Conn. ; at Park Street Church, Boston, seven years ; Music Hall, Independent Congregational Church, three years, — fifteen years in all of steady, continuous service. From preacher to a small country congregation, his abilities and laborious studentship lifted him in six years to the leading pulpit in his denomination. In Boston, then as now the most literary city in the country, — whose pulpits and platforms had been for fifty years their pride, where eloquence of the highest order was familiar to all, — he remained for ten years, preaching to larger audiences every Sunday than any other preacher in the land, and, with one exception, as a pulpit orator, without a peer. At the close of these fifteen years of service he retired from the ministry and the clerical profession, and entered upon a course of study best calculated in his opinion to fit him for authorship and the platform, broadly interpreted. He went abroad and made a thorough examination of English commercial methods, — her trade relations, her land system, and the tendency of her social and political forces. He remained a close observer of the great battle between Gladstone and D'Israeli, which ended in the triumph of the former, and then returned to his own country and entered upon a study of the resources and characteristics of this continent. To this investigation he devoted six years, and when he has completed his present extensive tour he will have personally visited, with the exception of Alaska, every representative section of the continent between Hudson's Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and between Newfoundland and Vancouver. Few public or literary men, if any, have studied so thoroughly the resources of this continent, and the vast problems growing out of our continental development, as Mr. Murray. It is greatly to be desired, from every point of view, that one so well equipped for intelligent and candid discussion of these problems may be constrained by popular encouragement to do so. In his self-command, in his reserve force, in the purity of his language, almost wholly Saxon, in quiet intensity and grace of style, in dignity of bearing, in clearness of statement, in the finish of his sentences, and in charm of his manner, he stands alone, although suggesting comparison, in one or more of these attributes, with many great writers. Three years ago he began to read his now celebrated story, " How John Norton the Trapper kept his Christmas," and the people have insisted on hearing the author render this quaint, humorous, and pathetic bit of realism until it has already passed its three hundred and fiftieth delivery from the platform, and has been sold in book-form by thousands. LsJLbbme ?S2fX? / 3,1 15 —. 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Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Boston : Cupples and Hurd
Rare Books and Special Collections
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University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. PS2459.M43 D39 1888
[Daylight land: the experiences, incidents, and adventures, humorous and otherwise, which befel Judge John Doe, tourist, of San Francisco]
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