sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the
bumpy railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with
lanterns, and with them have come typewriters, and stenographers,
and the art of printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of
those who sell handfuls of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands
of miles away--"Do others as they would do you." And with it, too,
has come the legitimate business of barter and trade, with eyes on
all that treasure of the North which lies between the Grand Rapids
of the Athabasca and the edge of the polar sea. But still more
beautiful than the dream of fortunes quickly made is the deep-
forest superstition that the spirits of the wilderness dead move
onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, the ghosts
of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily from
their graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther
north.

For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his
Jeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened and
closed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for
two thousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing.
South of it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so
many months ago by boat.

It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and
Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the
blue and the gray and the sometimes watery ones of a destroying
civilization. And there it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive
mingles with their age-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts
over their forests; the phonograph screeches its reply to le
violon; and Pierre and Henri and Jacques no longer find themselves