k for continuous travel.

On the night of the 19th of February we made our last camp on the ridge
to the south of Lake Manitoba, fifty miles from Fort Garry. Not without
a feeling of regret was the old work gone through for the last time--the
old work of tree-cutting, and fire-making, and supper-frying, and
dog-feeding. Once more I had reached those confines of civilization on
whose limits four months earlier I had made my first camp on the
shivering Prairie of the Lonely Grave; then the long journey lay before
me, now the unnumbered scenes of nigh 3000 miles of travel were spread
out in that picture which memory sees in the embers of slow-burning
fires, when the night-wind speaks in dreamy tones to the willow branches
and waving grasses. And if there be those among my readers who can il
comprehend such feelings, seeing only in this return the escape from
savagery to civilization--from the wild Indian to the Anglo-American,
from the life of toil and hardship to that of rest and comfort-then words
would be useless to throw light upon the matter, or to better enable
such men to understand that it was possible to look back with keen regret
to the wild days of the forest and the prairie. Natures, no matter how we
may mould them beneath the uniform pressure of the great machine called
civilization, are not all alike, and many men's minds echo in some shape
or other the voice of the Kirghis woman, which says, "Man must keep
moving; for, behold, sun, moon, stars, water, beast, bird, fish, all are
in movement: it is but the dead and the earth that remain in one place."

There are many who have seen a prisoned lark sitting on its perch,
looking listlessly through the bars, from some brick wall against which
its cage was hung; but at times, when the spring comes round, and a bit
of grassy earth is put into the narrow cage, and, in spite of smoke and
mist, the blue sky looks a moment on the foul face of the city, the little
prisoner dreams himself free, and, with eyes fixed on the blue sky
and feet clasping the tiny turf of green sod, he pours forth into the dirty
street those notes which nature taught him in the never-to-be-forgotten
days of boundless freedom. So I have seen an Indian, far down
in Canada, listlessly watching the vista of a broad river whose waters
and whose shores once owned the dominion of his race; and when I told him
of regions where his brothers still built their lodges midst the
wandering herds of the stupen