burned upon the altar of gratitude and contentment.

Patrick, I noticed about this time, liked to get on the leeward side
of as many pipes as possible, and as near as he could to the
smokers. He said that this kept away the mosquitoes. There he
would sit, with the smoke drifting full in his face, both hands in
his pockets, talking about Quebec, and debating the comparative
merits of a boy or a girl as an addition to his household.

But the great trial of his virtue was yet to come. The main object
of our trip down the River of Barks--the terminus ad quem of the
expedition, so to speak--was a bear. Now the bear as an object of
the chase, at least in Canada, is one of the most illusory of
phantoms. The manner of hunting is simple. It consists in walking
about through the woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet
a bear; then you try to shoot him. This would seem to be, as the
Rev. Mr. Leslie called his book against the deists of the eighteenth
century, "A Short and Easie Method." But in point of fact there are
two principal difficulties. The first is that you never find the
bear when and where you are looking for him. The second is that the
bear sometimes finds you when--but you shall see how it happened to us.

We had hunted the whole length of the River of Barks with the utmost
pains and caution, never going out, even to pick blueberries,
without having the rifle at hand, loaded for the expected encounter.
Not one bear had we met. It seemed as if the whole ursine tribe
must have emigrated to Labrador.

At last we came to the mouth of the river, where it empties into
Lake Kenogami, in a comparatively civilized country, with several