oric Red and Assiniboine Rivers
meet, about whose bells one of America's sweetest singers, Whittier, had
written lines that have endeared his name to every worshipper that bends
the knee in that prairie sanctuary. The lines were drifting through his
mind now. They were the first words of English poetry he had learned to
memorize:

"Is it the clang of the wild geese?
Is it the Indian's yell,
That lends to the call of the north wind
The tones of a far-off bell?

"The voyageur smiles as he listens
To the sound that grows apace.
Well he knows the vesper ringing
Of the bells of St. Boniface.

"The bells of the Roman mission--
That call from their turrets twain
To the boatman on the river,
To the hunter on the plain."

"To the hunter on the plain," said Shag's thoughts, over and over.
Perhaps the hunter was his trapper father, who with noiseless step
and wary eye was this very moment stalking some precious fur-bearing
animal, whose pelt would bring a good price at the great Hudson's Bay
trading-post; a price that would go toward keeping his son at this
Eastern college for many terms. Shag's grey-brown eyes grew dreamy. He
saw the vast prairies sweeping away into the West, and his father, a
mere speck on the horizon, the ever-present "gun," the silent moccasin,
the scarlet sash, the muffled step, all proclaiming "the hunter on the
plain."

The prayers were ended and Shag found that he was not really watching
his father coming up some prairie trail, but that before him was a
different type of man, Professor Warwick, whose studious eyes now
required glasses to see through, and whose hand was white and silken
in its touch--how hopelessly lost this little man would be should
circumstances turn him forth to gain his livelihood at hunting and
trapping. Old Larocque himself would hardly be more incongruous teaching
in this college. It was this thought that made Shag smile as he rose
from his knees, with the echoes of the bells of St. Boniface haunting
his heart.

Then the chapel emptied, each boy on breakfast bent. "Cop" Billings
still remained at the Indian's elbow, but at the door one or two of
the masters stopped to greet the new arrival, and a tall, remarkably
handsome lad waited, apparently to speak. He was a boy that anyone would
pick from a crowd of fifty--straight, well-built, with fine, strong,
thin hands, and a face with contradictory eyes, for they twinkled and
danced as if