village lay. Far, far over, two days' march away, he could see the
cluster of houses, and the glow of the sun on the tin spire of the little
Mission Church where he had heard the girl and her mother sing, till the
hearts of all were swept by feeling and ravished by the desire for "the
peace of the Holy Grail." The village was, in truth, but a day's march
away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could not be
hastened. Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the village,
was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy grey beard
and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose
soul was tuned to past suffering. As he sat, his head sunk on his
breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine--the token of a progressive
civilisation--his chin upon his hand, he looked like the figure of Moses
made immortal by Michael Angelo. But his strength was not like that of
the man beside him, who was thirty years younger. When he walked, it was
as one who had no destination, who had no haven towards which to travel,
who journeyed as one to whom the world is a wilderness, and one tent or
one hut is the same as another, and none is home.

Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles
of water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of
miles apart, whose courses are not the same, they two had met, the elder
man, sick and worn, and near to death, in the poor hospitality of an
Indian's tepee. John Bickersteth had nursed the old man back to
strength, and had brought him southward with him--a silent companion, who
spoke in monosyllables, who had no conversation at all of the past, and
little of the present; but who was a woodsman and an Arctic traveller of
the most expert kind; who knew by instinct where the best places for
shelter and for sleeping might be found; who never complained, and was
wonderful with the dogs. Close as their association was, Bickersteth had
felt concerning the other that his real self was in some other sphere or