beginning, majestic in its solitary grandeur and eternally green. Pine
and hemlock, balsam and cedar, had followed in due succession others
that had grown to the fulness of their stature only in centuries, and
their healing essence, which brings sound sleep to man's jaded body and
tranquillity to his mind, had doubtless risen like incense when all was
made very good.

Now Alton loved the wilderness, partly because he had been born in it,
and because he had a large share of the spirit of his race. He had
also seen the cities, and they did not greatly please him, though he
had watched their inhabitants curiously and been taught a good deal
about them by what he read in books, which to the wonder of his
associates he would spend hardly-earned dollars upon. It was more
curious that he understood all he read, and sometimes more than the
writer apparently did, for Alton was not only the son of a clever man,
but had seen Nature in her primitive nakedness and the human passions
that usually lie beneath the surface, for man reverts a little and the
veneer of his civilization wears through in the silent bush.

Thus he plodded on contentedly on his twelve-mile march, with the snow
and the mire beneath it reaching now and then to his knee, until his
companion stopped beside a little bark shanty and lighted a lantern.

"Thomson's dumping-place already," he said, pulling a burst cotton bag
out of the sack of sundries upon the Cayuse pony's back. "Some of it
has got out, and Jimmy was always particular about the weight of his
sugar. Well, the rest of it must be in the bottom somewhere, and if
you'll hold the sack up I'll shake it into my hat."

Alton's hat was capacious, and he had worn it during the two years