s a
card bearing the exact address of the 'Anchorage'. I am going there as
quickly as possible, to make speedy arrangements for my long journey
West, to that place almost within sound of the Pacific Ocean."

"Put your hand in mine. Promise me before God, that you will not vanish
from me; that you will not leave the 'Anchorage' until I come and see
you there."

"I promise; but time presses. I must hasten to find Bertie."

"Do you know exactly where to go?"

"Yes. I have minute directions written down."

"Wait until I come. I trust you to keep your promise. Ah! after to-day,
I could not bear to lose my 'Rosa Alba.' God make me more worthy of my
loyal and beautiful darling. After all, not Alcestis, but Antigone!"

CHAPTER XXXV.

White and still, lay the world of the far Northwest, wrapped in peace
as profound as that which reigned in primeval ages; when ancestral
Nahuas, dragging their sleds across frozen Behring Straits, or cast
amid other drift of the Japanese current upon the strange new Pacific
shore, climbed the mountains, and fell on their faces before the sun,
whose worshippers have sacrificed in all hemispheres.

If civilization be the analogue of geologic accretion, how tortuous is
the trend and dip of the ethnological strata, how abrupt the
overlapping of myths. How many aeons divided the totem coyote from the
she-wolf of Romulus and Remus? Which is the primitive and parent flame,
the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta,
of Persian Atish-khudahs? If the Laurentian system be the oldest
upheaval of land, and its "dawn animal" the first evolution of life
that left fossil footprints, where are all the missing links in
ethnology, which would save science that rejects Genesis--the paradox
of peopling the oldest known continent by immigration from those
incalculably younger?

Winter had lagged, loath to set his snow shoes upon the lingering,
diaphanous train of Indian Summer, but December was inexorable, and the
livery of ice glittered everywhere in the mid-day sun.

Along a well-worn bridle trail, now slippery as glass, winding around
the base of crags, through narrow gorges that almost overarched,
leaving a mere skylight of intense blue to mark the way, moved a party
of four persons in single file, slowly ascending a steep spiral. In
advance, mounted on a black pony, was a cowled monk, whose long, thin
profile suggested that of Savonarola; and just behind him rode a
C