orld.
The snow fell; the river and the bay froze. Strange men from the
North glided silently to the Factor's door, bearing the meat and
pelts of the seal. Bitter iron cold shackled the northland, the
abode of desolation. Armies of caribou drifted by, ghostly under
the aurora, moose, lordly and scornful, stalked majestically along
the shore; wolves howled invisible, or trotted dog-like in
organized packs along the river banks. Day and night the ice
artillery thundered. Night and day the fireplaces roared defiance
to a frost they could not subdue, while the people of desolation
crouched beneath the tyranny of winter.

Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, the
Moose roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot by
foot to the very dooryard of her father's house. Strange spirits
were abroad at night, howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning in
voices of ice and flood. Her Indian nurse told her of them all--of
Mannabosho, the good; of Nenaubosho the evil--in her lisping
Ojibway dialect that sounded like the softer voices of the forest.

At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eager
blossoming of the land into new leaves, lush grasses, an abandon of
sweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, a thousand singing
birds sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph.
Overhead shone the hot sun of the Northern summer.

From the wilderness came the _brigades_ bearing their pelts, the
hardy traders of the winter posts, striking hot the imagination
through the mysterious and lonely allurement of their callings.
For a brief season, transient as the flash of a loon's wing on the
shadow of a lake, the post was bright with the thronging of many
people. The Indians pitched their wigwams on the broad meadows
below the bend; the half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright
teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it might concern; the traders
gazed stolidily over their little black pipes, and uttered brief
sentences through their thick black beards. Everywhere was gay
sound--the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay
color--the red sashes of the _voyageurs_, the beaded moccasins and
leggings of the _metis_, the capotes of the _brigade_, the
variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways. Like the wild roses
around the edge of the muskegs, this brief flowering of the year
passed. Again the nights were long, again the frost crept down
from the eternal snow, again the