ministered to the sick, for that was a part of her code of life.
Everywhere she carried her glad smile, her cheery greeting, her
wistful earnestness, to brighten what seemed to her the sad and lonely
lives of these silent men of the North.

And she succeeded, not because she was unlike other millions of her
kind, but because of the difference between the fortieth degree and
the sixtieth--the difference in the viewpoint of men who fought
themselves into moral shreds in the big game of life and those who
lived a thousand miles nearer to the dome of the earth.

A few days before there had come a wonderful event in the history of
the company's post. A new life was born into the little cabin of
Cummins and his wife. After this the silent, wordless worship of their
people was filled with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife
was a mother! She was one of them now, an indissoluble part of their
existence--a part of it as truly as the strange lights for ever
hovering over the pole, as surely as the countless stars that never
left the night skies, as surely as the endless forests and the deep
snows!

Then had come the sudden change, and the gloom, that brought with it
the shadow of death, fell like a pall upon the post, stifling its
life, and bringing with it a grief that those who lived there had
never known before.

There came to them no word from Cummins now.

He stood for a moment before his lighted door, and then went back, and
the word passed softly from one to another that the most beautiful