to leave the
unpleasant task of execution to menial hands, while he goes out into the
wild country to capture his game by his own skill,--if he has good
luck. I would rather run some risk in this enterprise (even as the young
Tobias did, when the voracious pike sprang at him from the waters of the
Tigris, and would have devoured him but for the friendly instruction
of the piscatory Angel, who taught Tobias how to land the monster),--I
would far rather take any number of chances in my sport than have it
domesticated to the point of dulness.

The trim plantations of trees which are called "forests" in certain
parts of Europe--scientifically pruned and tended, counted every year by
uniformed foresters, and defended against all possible depredations--are
admirable and useful in their way; but they lack the mystic enchantment
of the fragments of native woodland which linger among the Adirondacks
and the White Mountains, or the vast, shaggy, sylvan wildernesses which
hide the lakes and rivers of Canada. These Laurentian Hills lie in No
Man's Land. Here you do not need to keep to the path, for there is none.
You may make your own trail, whithersoever fancy leads you; and at night
you may pitch your tent under any tree that looks friendly and firm.

Here, if anywhere, you shall find Dryads, and Naiads, and Oreads. And
if you chance to see one, by moonlight, combing her long hair beside
the glimmering waterfall, or slipping silently, with gleaming shoulders,
through the grove of silver birches, you may call her by the name that
pleases you best. She is all your own discovery. There is no social
directory in the wilderness.

One side of our nature, no doubt, finds its satisfaction in the regular,
the proper, the conventional. But there is another side of our
nature, underneath, that takes delight in the strange, the free, the
spontaneous. We like to discover what we call a law of Nature, and make
our calculations about it, and harness the force which lies behind it
for our own purposes. But we taste a different kind of joy when an
event occurs which nobody has foreseen or counted upon. It seems like
an evidence that there is something in the world which is alive and
mysterious and untrammelled.

The weather-prophet tells us of an approaching storm. It comes according
to the programme. We admire the accuracy of the prediction, and
congratulate ourselves that we have such a good meteorological service.
But when, perchance, a br