who possessed, withal, loyalty and affection as sturdy as his own
strength.

"When I have worked hard and saved me some money, I will go to
Colorado," he had told Edith on the day after their wedding. A
year later they were in Colorado, where Hans Nelson saw his first
mining and caught the mining-fever himself. His prospecting led
him through the Dakotas, Idaho, and eastern Oregon, and on into the
mountains of British Columbia. In camp and on trail, Edith Nelson
was always with him, sharing his luck, his hardship, and his toil.
The short step of the house-reared woman she exchanged for the long
stride of the mountaineer. She learned to look upon danger clear-
eyed and with understanding, losing forever that panic fear which
is bred of ignorance and which afflicts the city-reared, making
them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen
horror instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self-
destroying terror which clutters the way with their crushed
carcasses.

Edith Nelson met the unexpected at every turn of the trail, and she
trained her vision so that she saw in the landscape, not the
obvious, but the concealed. She, who had never cooked in her life,
learned to make bread without the mediation of hops, yeast, or
baking-powder, and to bake bread, top and bottom, in a frying-pan
before an open fire. And when the last cup of flour was gone and
the last rind of bacon, she was able to rise to the occasion, and
of moccasins and the softer-tanned bits of leather in the outfit to
make a grub-stake substitute that somehow held a man's soul in his
body and enabled him to stagger on. She learned to pack a horse as
well as a man, - a task to break the heart and the pride of any