appointed function of showing these people how to satisfy that need.

Apart from these spiritual perplexities he found himself troubled over
practical matters. His creed of blind trust in Providence did not seem
so sound and true. He found himself dreading the hour when his swarthy
guides would leave him to his lonely quarters. He beheld terrible vistas
of loneliness, a state of feeling to which he had always been a
stranger. He foresaw a series of vain struggles over that rusty
cookstove. It did him no good to recall that he had been told in the
beginning that he would occupy the mission quarters, that he must
provide himself with ample supplies of food, that he might have to
prepare that food himself.

His mind had simply been unable to envisage the sordid reality of these
things until he faced them. Now that he did face them they seemed more
terrible than they really were.

Lying wakeful on his bed that night, listening to the snoring of the
half-breeds on the floor, to the faint murmur of a wind that stirred the
drooping boughs of the spruce, he reviewed his enthusiasms and his
tenuous plans--and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call
himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon
so slender a foundation as this appointment to a mission in the outlying
places. He blamed the Board of Missions. Obviously that august circle of
middle-aged and worthy gentlemen were sadly ignorant of the North.

Whereupon, recognizing the trend of his thought, the Reverend Wesley
Thompson turned upon himself with a bitter accusation of self-seeking,
and besought earnestly the gift of an humble spirit from Above.