elaborate here, he heard discussed by expert opinion. Gradually
he acquired an enthusiasm for the woods, just as a boy conceives
a longing for the out-of-door life of which he hears in the
conversation of his elders about the winter fire. He became eager
to get away to the front, to stand among the pines, to grapple with
the difficulties of thicket, hill, snow, and cold that nature
silently interposes between the man and his task.

At the end of the week he received four dollars from his employer;
dumped his valise into a low bobsleigh driven by a man muffled in a
fur coat; assisted in loading the sleigh with a variety of things,
from Spearhead plug to raisins; and turned his face at last toward
the land of his hopes and desires.

The long drive to camp was at once a delight and a misery to him.
Its miles stretched longer and longer as time went on; and the
miles of a route new to a man are always one and a half at least.
The forest, so mysterious and inviting from afar, drew within
itself coldly when Thorpe entered it. He was as yet a stranger.
The snow became the prevailing note. The white was everywhere,
concealing jealously beneath rounded uniformity the secrets of the
woods. And it was cold. First Thorpe's feet became numb, then his
hands, then his nose was nipped, and finally his warm clothes were
lifted from him by invisible hands, and he was left naked to
shivers and tremblings. He found it torture to sit still on the top
of the bale of hay; and yet he could not bear to contemplate the
cold shock of jumping from the sleigh to the ground,--of touching
foot to the chilling snow. The driver pulled up to breathe his
horses at the top of a hill, and to fasten under one runner a heavy
chain, which, grinding into the snow, would act as a brake on the