before I could lay him out with the potato stomper.

"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all
that; but it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and
expressly born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild
crowd in Juneau them days, but I looked at the other women, and
their way of life didn't excite me. I reckon I wanted to be
clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I guess; and I
reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."

Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to
himself some thread of thought.

"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a
tribe of wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of
hunting territory. And it happened, simply enough, though, for
that matter, she might have lived and died among the pots and
pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the vision.' That was all she
needed, and she got it.

"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap
of newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to
you.' And then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:

"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to
year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the
Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the
wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he
preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted
from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature.