show the village
sleeping beneath.

The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the stars glittered
almost white. The wind came out of the west, cold but amiable; the
cracked bell of a switch engine gurgled querulously at intervals,
followed by the bumping of coupling freight cars; roosters were crowing,
and sleepy train men were assembling in sullen silence.

The couple walked with arms locked like lovers, but the tones of their
voices had the quality which comes after marriage. They were man and
wife.

The woman's clear voice arose. "O Ed, isn't this delicious? What one
misses by not getting up early!"

"Sleep, for instance," laughed her husband.

"Don't drag me down. You know what I mean. Let's get up early every
morning while we're up here in the woods."

"Shouldn't wonder if we had to. There'll be a lot to do, and I want to
get back to Chicago by the 1st of February."

"This is an experience! Isn't it still? When is our train due?"

"Due now; I think that is our headlight up the track."

As he spoke, an engine added its voice to the growing noise of the
station, and drew solemnly down the frosty steel.

An eruption of shapeless forms of men from the depot filled the one
general coach of the train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of
fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to outdoor
life--powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, traveling
men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient
oxlike faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets,
were sprinkled about.

The young wife was a fine type of woman anywhere, but these surroundings
made her seem very dainty and startlingly beautiful. Her husband had the
fair skin of a city man, but his powerful shoulders and firm step
denoted health and wholesome living. They were good to see as man and
wife.

They soon felt the reaction to sleepiness which comes to those not
accustomed to early rising, and the wife, soothed by the clank of the
train, leaned her head on her husband's shoulder and dozed. He looked
out upon the landscape, glad that his wife was not observing it. He did
not know such desolation existed in Wisconsin.

On every side were the evidences of a ruined forest land. A landscape of
flat wastes, of thinned and burned and uprooted trees. A desolate and
apparently useless land.

Here and there a sawmill stood gray and sagging, surrounded by little
cabins of unpain