in the woods;" he is the only one who never appears to play, who has no interest in natural history, or Nature Guides either, nor the world. Up and on they went, except a lady and a gentleman who lingered to watch porky. In the edge of the woods the Guide stopped to wait for them. Plainly panic-stricken they were, just disappear ing in the woods headed north. Asking the others not to stir until he returned, the Guide dashed after them. .66 On reuniting the party the Guide discussed the necessity of all staying together. "Most people," he said, are easily confused and lost. It is thus bad for one to forge ahead, or to turn aside, or to stay behind. Moving together is absolutely necessary for the happiness of the party." Once," he continued, "a capable fellow said he would go ahead and wait for us at the foot of a near-by cliff. He never reached the cliff. While looking for him others of the party scattered, and each and all were lost and remained out overnight." 66 A little before noon the party walked out of the uppermost edge of the woods among the dwarfed trees and distorted groves at timber-line-an aged and battered forest of trees, small and strange. They were above the altitude of eleven thousand feet. Before them on the edge of an arctic moorland lay a snow-field about two blocks long. It appeared somewhat like uncut marble. Stained with rock dust, inlaid with wind-blown beetles and grasshoppers, its granular material lay melting in the sun. A bright flower border encircled it. This was made up of flowers of many kinds and colors, flowers with and without perfume, flowers dwarfed, and flowers on tall, stately stalks. In small compass were a variety of soil, exclude competitors. It was determinism-conditions determining the distribution. It probably is true that many of these dwarfed flowers were developed around the Arctic Circle. The Guide recounted the great ice age story-how seeds and life had been swept southward by the ice and by retreating birds and animals who gave way before the irresistible slow-moving glacier. On the mountains the seeds grew-found a home; so too the ptarmigan, in somewhat similar conditions to the old one in the Arctic. In this new colony party is absorbed in details. But a Nature Guided party is vastly different from these. In a Nature party its members have a common interest. They are not in a hurry, they are in a mood to be human. They make intimate friendships while getting acquainted with Nature and with themselves. They take on a wider, happier outlook. All are glad to be living. Leaving the snow-field, these people rambled along the timber-line. They saw the dwarfed trees and the deformed trees, they noted the pines that held the forest front on dry, wind-swept ridges, and the spruces that triumphed in the moist places. Timber-line has a thousand interesting stories for the visitor. Here the party lingered till near evening. At the foot of the mountain near the automobile they examined a beaver colony and saw where sediment-filled ponds had become beaver meadows; they watched the evening antics and activities of the few beavers that commonly came forth about sundown; and at last they started for the car, discussing the beaver in history and his place in conservation. An acquaintance with Nature is worth while. A well-known university man says: "What I wish to bring out particularly does not concern the enrichment of botanical and zoological knowledge, greatly important as I regard this, but rather the enlarging and liberalizing influences which Nature has on the public mind generally.' The world is beginning to appreciate the necessity of an outside interest. Fortunate is the individual who has a Nature hobby. Such an interest is known to improve health, lengthen life, and increase efficiency. An excursion with a Nature Guide may give the individual a better hobby. On other days the interest of the Na A BIGHORN IN THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK soil; the birth, life, and death of a lake; home territory of animals; wind, the great seed-sower, are among the themes sometimes discussed. Each person received a chapter in a natural history story which helped him to be eager for other chapters which he might find anywhere outdoors. . The bighorn, or wild mountain sheep, was frequently seen at close range. Why they lived in the heights among the peaks the year round was a story that ever stirred. Their scene-commanding, wild environment has exacted of them alertness, positiveness, sharp eyes, and the ability to safely play where there is much space and little substance beneath them. In connection with schools and education field studies and classes afield are excellent. There is too little of this, and most of it is too serious and amounts almost to being an invasion of Nature, with the miserly intent of amassing facts. The romance and the vision possible usually are overlooked. Nature casts no spell, gives no new landscapes to the student's life. Field studies are chiefly concerned with acquiring facts; Nature Guiding, with giving new landscapes and reaching the imagination. A few people for years have practiced Nature Guiding occasionally. It has made good, and it has a place in National life. It carries with it health, new ideas, and inspiration. Last year Nature Guiding was given a definite place in several of the National parks by the Government's licensing a number of Nature Guides to conduct people through the wilds. A Nature Guide is an interpreter of geology, botany, zoology, and natural history. Nature ever is liberalizing, and the Nature Guide is one of the forces moving for the newer education and for the ideal of internationalism. Nature Guiding is a magnificent field for young people who are well equipped and who have a vision. Many Guides are young women. Some one has called the imagination the supreme intellectual faculty, and Nature Guiding aims chiefly to appeal to this. Thus rainy days and night trips are recommended because on these the things seen are few and most strange, incomplete, and suggestive. Nature Guiding is not like sightseeing or the scenery habit. The Guide sometimes takes his party to a commanding view-point or a beautiful spot. But views are incidental. The aim is to illuminate and reveal the alluring world outdoors by introducing determining influences and the respondent tendencies. A Nature Guide should have imagina tion. He should be able to discuss the essentials in concise, suggestive statements, but generally remain silent. He should have a knowledge of human nature. Children enthusiastically enjoy a day with a Nature Guide, and fortunate the child who can have a number of these excursions. They are thought-compelling, interest-arousing. Children are led after 66 AT THE TIMBER-LINE They saw the dwarfed trees and the deformed trees the manner of old people. They must not be talked down to. The Guide may enter a little more intimately into their joys, perhaps, making slight readjustment to their tastes. As a rule the imagination of children is more readily and definitely fired than that of older people. One day a Guide was out with several children under eight years children under eight years of age. They discussed a double-topped spruce. They learned that the former single top was broken off and that the two topmost twigs then bent upwards and raced for leadership. They had run a dead heat, as it were, and both of them became the leaders. During the remainder of the day the children often spotted a doubletopped tree. The cones of trees were noticed, and, of course, the cones of the balsam fir caused comment because these stood upon the limbs instead of hanging from them. In a small area where a forest fire had swept fifteen years before a few live veteran trees had survived. An examination of two of these revealed old fire scars. One of these scars indicated that the tree had been injured by the fire of fifteen years before and by another fire of eighty-seven years previous. A few young aspens and thousands of young lodge-pole seedlings were starting. Why the lodge-pole pines were the first to start in the burned-over area was a question that brought out a discussion concerning what trees were commonly the first to appear in a cleared or burned-over area, and why. Only a few species of young trees thrive in the sunlight; others need shade in which to start. This principle appealed to the children. An old seed-hoarding lodge-pole on the edge of the burned area was surrounded. It had borne a crop of cones each year for seventeen years. All of these cones, unopened, clung thickly over its limbs. A few days before, the Guide had led a party of older people over precisely the route followed by these children. He had talked to both parties similarly, but apparently the children had more deep and lasting enjoyment out of the day. John Muir is said to have been an almost ideal Nature Guide. He reached both the young and the old. His botany and geology commonly were in the nature of a story. The past struggles and triumphs of the plant, its present influences, its response to environment, its relation to ourselves, were artistically mingled with the essential facts of its life. Nature Guiding need not be confined to National parks. Fabre has shown monsters and hundreds of little stirring people co-operating or battling in every growth-filled space. City parks and the wild places near cities and villages are near thousands of people and are excellent places for the cultural and inspiring excursions with Nature Guides. There might well be Nature Guides in every locality in the land. PRECEDENTS of great historic value are being established in aeronantics. For instance, not long ago steps DE were taken to establish the first air port in the history of the world. The purposes are interesting from a historic view-point as well as for the indications to s which they give of the progress of developments in aeronautics. Aircraft starting from this air port can be registered under the rules of the Aircraft Inspection Service of the Department of Commerce, having clearance papers just as the ships of the sea have. er 2 This port will be located at Atlantic City and will be a point of departure for transatlantic liners-ocean planes, transcontinental land planes, and large rigid dirigibles which in the future may even have sufficient power to circumnavigate the globe. An ideal airship port would be an airdrome about one mile square; a double airship shed capable of housing two great dirigibles a thousand feet long; a mooring tower with bow mooring gear; mechanical handling gear for transferring the airship from the mooring tower to the shed; hydrogen generating plants and storage tanks; workshops, stores, meteorological building and wireless, telegraph, telephone, and direction signal station which would be to aircraft what the lighthouse is to ma rine commerce. The mooring tower should be one hundred and fifty feet high, with a revolving head to which the airship can be fastened by its nose clear to swing around in accordance with the direction of the wind, Just as a ship would swing at its moorings or anchor. Fuel and hydrogen pipes would -be connected to the ship and a gangway for passengers to enter after having been brought up in an elevator from the ground. Large dirigibles have been projected in England that would have a capacity of three hundred tons and contain ten million feet of gas, with cabins for passengers on the upper side, and motive power to propel them at a speed of eighty miles an hour. Passenger rates between New York and London have been figured at £48, or $240, and the time between New York and London would be two to two and a half days, or one-half of the time of the fastest steamers. It is interesting to compare these figures with the fare figured for airplane travel, which is £115, or $585, but the journey would be accomplished in one-half the time, although the accommodations would not be so luxurious, and even the largest airplanes would be very much smaller than the airships. It is very interesting to see how our ideas of time and distance must be entirely revised and changed on account of this new method of transportation, because we have already had flights from London to India of 5,800 miles in a little over fifty hours flying time; many flights BY ALAN R. HAWLEY PRESIDENT OF THE AERO CLUB OF AMERICA from London to Cairo in a day and a half, and routes have been laid out between London and Colombo, four and a half days; to Perth, seven days; to Nairobi, three and a half days; to Cape Town, five and a half days; and to Rio de Janeiro, four days. Here in the United States Major T. C. Macaulay has flown from coast to coast in twenty hours flying time; from San Diego to Jacksonville, making a speed of 137 miles per hour on the major part of his journey. He has flown altogether 5,500 miles in forty-four hours fifteen minutes. Two squadrons of Army planes have flown from San Diego to Mineola and return, and we have many official reports of journeys between four and five thousand miles. One of the most important transportation lines projected in this country is to run between Los Angeles, San Diego, and Riverside, in California, using Martin twin-motored machines, charging $25 a trip between Los Angeles and San Diego, and $12.50 between Los Angeles and Riverside. The general charges for training in this country have been $1.50 a minute, and for passenger flights at about a dollar a minute. Very soon the airplane tariff will be on the basis of fifty cents a mile a minute, and the new element of time will enter into transportation figures. In the case of very high salaried and Government officials transportation expense sinks into insignificance, while the ordinary traveling public might consider it expensive. Many will be attracted by the novelty of flying, and on special routes tourists will be attracted by the exceptional opportunities offered to view grand and magnificent scenery from the heavens. When we have seen in America large dirigibles arrive from Europe, and now that the crossing of the Atlantic by airplane is a record of history, the development of the aircraft itself will continue to make these feats, at first hazardous, become commonplace, and all the luxuries of travel will be added, together with the advantages which aerial travel offers. Aerial routes are laid out without curve or grade, thus shortening the distances to be accomplished materially and enabling aircraft to rise above storms into regions of sunshine and when passing over deserts to rise to cooler temperatures, and in many cases to take advantage of favorable air currents, as the ships of the sea are favored by the trade winds which blow regularly over the surface of the earth. The high atmosphere is pure and free from dust and the immense spaces will prevent congestion. One of the most important and one of the first commercial developments in aeronautics no doubt will be its use for aerial photography, giving both plan views of cities, factories, shore lines, and docks, as well as oblique views which give the perspective and the "bird's-eye view which usually convey so much more than an ordinary surface photograph. The Forestry Commission of New York State has already arranged for taking photographs of the Adirondack Mountains, thus giving it detailed information which it could obtain in no other way and covering regions almost impassable by any other mode of locomotion. In the great Western forests special timber can be located, such as trees suitable for great masts of ships; fire areas, swamp areas, and the condition of growth can be easily and clearly seen. The second Pan-American Aeronautic Convention, held at Atlantic City under the auspices of the Aero Club of America and the Aerial League of America, brought out many new phases of the commercial side of this large subject, and chief among them were the interesting developments in the possibilities of the aerial mail service, which has been in operation over one year between New York and Washington and which has carried more than two hundred thousand pounds of mail, representing eight million letters, with absolute regularity. The same six planes, equipped with the same engines which were used a year ago, are still in service. On May 15, 1919, Lieutenant J. C. Edgerton, who piloted the first aerial mail plane into Washington from New York, and who is now Chief of Flying Operations of the Post Office Department, flew the same airplane and motor which he flew just one year before. Several of the planes had a record of over two hundred flying hours and fourteen thousand miles of flying per plane through all sorts of weather-snow-storms and wind gales-conclusively proving the feasibility of commercial flying. The recently formed aerial police of New York City is another indication of the importance of aeronautics in civil life. They are under the guidance of Colonel Jefferson De Mont Thompson, Major S. Herbert Mapes, and Major Granville A. Pollock, and a splendid and efficient aerial police corps has been formed in which are many aces of the American Air Force. One of the first of the duties of this newly formed force will be to photograph the entire city thoroughly, upon a scale which will show every detail more accurately than can be revealed in any other way. Landing-fields have been secured and facilities for patrolling the city, locating fires, preventing civil aviators from jeopardizing the safety of inhabitants, and patrolling the river; and the squadrons are prepared to respond at an instant's notice to any emergency which may arise. Other cities will soon follow the lead of New York. Newspapers will no doubt be the next to avail themselves of the news-gathering abilities of fast scout flying planes, while sightseeing buses will follow, and transportation lines in the due course of development. The subject of aerial insurance has received a great deal of attention both in this country and abroad, and it is now possible to get insurance (1) upon damage to machines from any cause; (2) accidents to passengers and pilots; (3) loss or damage to goods in transit; (4) liability of injury to the public or damage to the property of the public. Twenty of the leading insurance companies in England have combined to underwrite this insurance, each company acting independently and issuing its own policies. In this country insurance at reasonable rates can be obtained and will greatly add to the practicable financing of large companies. To give an idea of the estimated cost of running a transatlantic airship service from London to New York, it would be necessary to provide for Interest, depreciation, insurance, op- $8,000,000 Workshops, gas plant, and equipment. 3,000,000 300,000 750,000 at a total charge per crossing of $33,000, which, for 140 passengers, would make the cost per passenger about $240. The navigation of airships is similar to that of steamships, but is made more difficult by reason of drift, which has to be allowed for. When navigating over land, the pilot is able to determine the drift of the airship by observation of suitable fixed places on the earth's surface, and adjust places on the earth's surface, and adjust his compass course accordingly to give the desired true course. When navigating over seas, no fixed places are available, so if the motion of the wind is not known the course must be corrected by astronomical observation and determination of his charted position. A reliable and effective method of navigation is available, however, with the wireless installation. If the ship is in communication with two stations, they can determine the direction of the transmitted waves and signal to the ship its bearing, from which the ship's position can be laid off on its charts and the new departure determined. With airplanes the speed would be much faster, but the cost would be about twice as much, and there would be less room to move about and less comfort in travel. For long-distance voyages there is no doubt that the airship will be the more practicable. Before the war there was a constant use of airships in civil flying in Germany by the airships of 1910-11, and the annual reports of the companies operating showed a total number of flights of 826, with a duration of 1,853 hours, covering 102,675 miles, carrying 17,221 passengers, and this was done without any mishaps to passengers. The ships were equipped most luxuri ously, with inlaid mahogany paneling, a carpeted floors, and comfortable armchairs-in fact, regular Pullman car fittings with large windows, and luncheon and tea was served from a buffet. Twentyfive dollars was charged for a three-hour trip, and places had to be booked many days ahead. Regular trips were run from Berlin to Leipsic, and from Dresden to Munich. The companies made a profit and received a subsidy from the German Government for the use of the ships for training army and navy crews. There is no doubt that Germany to-day is preparing for an extensive scheme of air travel, and only recently there was organized a company, it was announced, to operate airships from Berlin to Constantinople, stopping at Munich and Vienna. New inventions are being made all the time to increase the safety of air travel, parachutes are being perfected, men are being more perfectly trained, and scientific methods are used to record the physical and medical phenomena incident to flying. 0 C Civilization is developing to a point where rapid aerial transportation and" intercommunication are making the world smaller and smaller, and political questions in remote corners of the world that never touched our lives are now entering our very doors. A marvelous future is opening for aerial navigation, and progress takes place faster than the world in general can keep up with the advance. Only a short time ago we were talking about the trans atlantic flight, and now it is accomplished, and still more wonderful things are conceived of as within the range of aeronautic possibility. I LA PARMACHENE BELLE! A STREAM, HAT man is not a sport who does THAT not begin his trout fishing in midwinter, when the woods are deep in snow and the ice thick upon the pools. My season usually opens suddenly, as if an unseen hand had touched a secret spring. This year it began on New Year's Day, when a friend sent me an art calendar. The picture wiped out the four months of wild weather that were to come and bade the birds sing, the fronds of ferns to uncurl, and the stream to flash brilliantly in the early May sunshine. But I moved forward by going backward-the art calendar awakened rich memories of the seasons past. The subject was only a detail, but such a detail! There was no foreground, no background, no horizon; the canvas was a surface of translucent water, and, rising through it, with head just breaking into air, was a superb trout, making his rise for a fly-a Parmachene Belle drooping from a taut leader which A SUPERSTITION, ran diagonally across the picture from the lower left to the upper right corner. In a moment, from that vivid detail, I reconstructed the entire scene-the fisherman standing in the swift current above the pool, last year's leaves lying among the yellow froth just beyond the cast, the labyrinth of the green-tinged twigs overhead, the broken clouds in the windhead, the broken clouds in the windswept sky, and the muscles of the wrist that would set the hook almost before the weight of the fish could be felt upon the line. That evening was one of sheer delight. Gone were all the regrets of the past Gone were all the regrets of the past months; stifled were all the poignant months; stifled were all the poignant yearnings blended with bitter frustration; obliterated was the one awful fear which drove me to my tasks day after day and held my eyes unsealed through the weary hours of many and many a night. For all honest men live in a purgatory of dread that, after all, they may fail in the one thing honest men long most to do provide decently for their loved ones. Among my friends I knowb not one who asks anything for himself vainglory, ambition, epicureanism, are absent; but to one and all life would seem satisfactory and well worth while i only no shadow of future poverty and shame were hanging over those they hac sworn to forefend. Yet even that mos haunting of horrors slipped away with the coming of the calendar. Memory and imagination conspired to crowd the hours with an elemental joy. First, I recalled a passage about Dean Stanley and Izaak Walton in Laurence Hutton's "Talks in a Library." The book was close at hand and the place marked 66 Going through the Abbey of West minster on a very memorable occasion with Miss Mary Anderson and her brother, under the escort of Dean Stan ley, the historian of the minster, he showed us a great many rare and curious things which were not contained in his own volume. He stopped before the e resh mural tablet to Isaac Casaubon, in the south transept, and said: "There is only one bit of desecration of the Abbey that I am disposed to forIgive. I'll show it to you.' And he laid his beautiful fingers in a caressing way upon the monogram initials I. W., and the date '1658,' which he had discovered to have been scratched there, with a nail, by Izaak Walton himself. This seemed to bring me as near to Walton-always dear to me as I had ever come. The Dean was kind enough to permit me to have a tracing made of the letters and figures, though such things were against the rules of the institution. or and and stop Izaak Walton had confessed the deed in one of his letters, and the gentle prelate told us that on discovering the fact, delate at night, he could not rest till he had proved for himself that the marks still existed. And with a lighted candle he went from the Deanery, in the silent hours of the morning, to satisfy himself that they were still there." Secondly, and inevitably, I turned to The Compleat Angler," to the inimiable chapter on Trout.' Could any'Trout.' Could any3000 hing be more restrained and at the same ime more ecstatic than the opening par ciden કત Tent ake graph: The trout is a fish highly valued both n this and foreign nations; he may be ustly said (as the old poet said of wine, end we English of venison) to be a. genrous fish; a fish that is so like the buck hat he also has his seasons; for it is observed that he comes in and goes out the if season with the stag and buck; Gesner Pays his name is of German offspring, nd he says he is a fish that feeds clean end purely in the swiftest streams, and n the hardest gravel; and that he may astly contend with all fresh-water fish, the mullet may with all sea-fish, for recedency and daintiness of taste, and hat being in right season, the most dainty alates have allowed precedency to him." When an old-school English gentleman rackets anything with wine and venison, e has seen a vision of something as near >heaven as eyes may look upon. I held by finger in the book and dreamed of a tream in the northern land, of a gray horning with the sun stabbing sudden hafts through the mists, of a slow-burnfag fire which crackled and hissed as the oisture fell upon it from the drenched oliage overhead, of smoke that hung thew and clung and spread out in leiurely tides, of trout and bacon in the an sizzling and spitting, and all the orld, all of my world, my very own world, wrapped in the aroma of boiling offee. "O God, let me live until May !" prayed. 66 In spite of the "handsome milkmaid, hat had not yet attained so much age nd wisdom as to load her mind of any ears of many things that will never be as too many men often do);" in spite of the witchery of the milkmaid's song, Come live with me, and be my love;" in spite of the lushness of those Eng sh pastures and the simple sophis tries of honest folk in the days of good Queen Bess; in spite of the moaning wind and the swirling snow outside and the lateness of the hour, I closed the book and dragged out my fishing kit. Pandora could not have broken up life's stodgy monotone more completely than did my old tackle-box. There were reels, spoons, phantom-minnows, lines, leaders, two long-lost pipes (one I recognized eagerly as a favorite), a jackknife, a little vial of vaseline, a Lake St. John Railroad time-table, and a score of other things as inseparable from the art of the angler as staff and ring are from the his toric episcopate. Infinite pains had been spent in their selection; each was the cue to a story full of pure adventure a story rich in the beauty of placid lakes and turbulent streams, of days when the heart took its fill of pleasure, innocent of anything corroding or coarsening. If life at its sanest could have been expressed in symbols, they were before my eyes. Themes of rapture ran fugue-like through my heart; gray and golden images of hope and joy overlapped and interfused; momentary emotions expanded into epics and epochs; chapters of a glorious pre-exist ence were reeled off as though a palimpsest had divulged a series of apocalypses. And my book of flies! This Jenny Lind, when did it last flick through an early purpling mist and freight the creel with the lordliest trophy of the day? That somber Heckle, so forlornly slim and old-maidish, where did it make its last kill? And the faded Montreal, now almost demure, what havoc had it wrought in swift swirling and broken water at the tailings of a pool below a noisy fall? And how phantomlike that White Miller must have settled upon a glassy open reach in the half-light just before nightfall! Each starts an ebb tide of primitive emotions running back into the eternity before men invented mutual interference and called it civilization. But the Parmachene Belle! It brings back what I have often tried to forget and have always wanted to understand, memories of a trip full of wonder and questioning and strange sadness, and of how I found a sermon in the weirdness of a wild night in the far North. II I went to the Lake Edward district quite late in the season. Raleigh had promised to have my guide and outfit in readiness, but upon my arrival I found the Montagnais Indians had gone back to Roberval for the trapping and the halfbreeds were already out with the early hunters. The only man around the place was Pete Lefevre, but he showed a great reluctance to accompanying me. Raleigh said he was an excellent guide, having lived for some years on Lake St. John, lived for some years on Lake St. John, and was there considered the most skillful and daring canoeist of all who risked ful and daring canoeist of all who risked the Grand Discharge. It took a full halfday, however, to win his consent, but from the first dip of his paddle I knew him to be an expert. On the portage he was as strong as a bull, carrying incredible packs and swinging up his canoe with careless ease. He was quick-eyed, dignified, unobtrusive, and very taciturn. We made Grand Bay easily the first afternoon and got some fishing to boot, and I expected to reach Ecarté by the next night. But we started late, broached our canoe badly about noon, and then after leaving Lake Eugene discovered that I had left my duffle bag at Lake Boquette. Pete's face grew more sullen with each delay. The only words he uttered were jerks of praise for the Emma River. He knew a wonderful pool up the river, and this was the only time in the year to fish it. The Emma district contained the only good fly ground south of the divide! The sweetest camp ever seen was up the Emma among the tamaracks! But not one of the reasons for a change of plans commended itself to me. I suggested that we make camp on the little portage between Algonquin and Stanis laus. To my amazement Pete dropped his paddle and exploded in such emphatic and profane protests that I yielded without a word. Still further to my surprise, he drove the canoe quite wide of the bay where the carry begins and on toward the Discharge. It was nearly sundown, and I did not demur. I could pick out a supper of small trout while he made camp near the outlet of Stanislaus. After supper, as we smoked by the friendship fire, I thought I caught an unusual furtiveness in his eyes and a note of uneasiness in his voice. He was fussy about the fire, too. It was rather an unpleasant night, black, gusty, and showery, with far-away thunder billowing over the intervening hills. Pete went to the edge of the lake, picked up the canoe and laid it across the opening through the brush as if to bar. any approach from that. quarter; behind us the timber was big and the undergrowth heavy. As the evening wore on the guide's uneasiness became more marked; he built up the fire repeatedly. Finally I drew him with banter. During the past few months he had been lumbering in Maine. “Oh, fie, Pete, to prefer the Yankee girls to the Canadian!" "No, M'sieur, it was not that," and he shook his head with solemn emphasis. "Not that!" "Ah, then there is more money in Maine than in Quebec!" But he protested so sadly that I was compelled to respect his reserve. After a while he said that he would tell me his story if I would not laugh at him or call him a fool or think him a coward. Of course I would not; nor do I even now. 66 M'sieur, it was on the down run of la petite portage from Stanislaus to A'gonquin. I was coming through alone, and light, from the Bostonnais. It was just when the tree shadows hit your face and then lay a long way back on the trail behind you. All at once I have a tight breathing and a moving heart; then, very sudden, a big bull caribou filled up the trail and his head down like as if he would charge. I tried to throw the canoe over between us, and then, mon Dieu,. |