r heavier, over the
forest. The sharp edges of the individual trees faded and blended, the
trunks blurred. He turned one fleeting glance of infinite, inexpressible
gratitude toward Ezram--the man who had brought him here and who now was
busily engaged in unpacking the canoe and making camp--then looked back
to his forests. The wind brought the wood smells,--spruce and moldering
earth and a thousand more no man could name. The great, watchful,
brooding spirit of the forest went in to him.

All at once his heart seemed to pause in his breast. He was
listening,--for what he did not know. His eyes strained into the
shadows. Brush wavered, a twig cracked with a miniature explosion. And
then two figures emerged into the beaver meadow opposite him.

They were only creatures of the wild, an old cow moose, black and
ungainly, and her long-legged, awkward calf. Yet they supplied the
detail that was missing. They were the one thing needed to complete the
picture--the crowning touch that revealed this land as it was--the
virgin wilderness where the creatures of the wild still held full sway.

But it did more. All at once a great clarity seemed to take possession
of his mind. Here, in these dark forests, were the _stimuli_ of which
Forest, the alienist, had spoken; and his brain seemed to leap, as in
one impulse, to the truth. Suddenly he knew the answer to all the
questions and problems that had troubled him so long.

Many times, in the past years, he had seen logs jammed in the water, a
veritable labyrinth that defied dissolution. Suddenly, as if by magic,
the key log would be ejected, and the whole jam would break, shatter
down in one stupendous crash, settle and dissolve, leaving at last only
drift logs floating quietly in the river. Thus it was with the confusion
in his brain. All at once it seemed to dissolve, the tangled skeins
straightened out, the association areas of his mind stirred full into
life once more. As he sat there, pale as the twilight sky, the mists of
amnesia lifted from him. He was cured as if by the touch of a holy man.

No wonder these forests depths were familiar. His boyhood and early
manhood, clear until the vortex of war had engulfed him, had been spent
amid just such surroundings, in just such silences, on the banks of
just such wilderness rivers. The same sky line of dark, heaven-reaching
spruce had fronted him of old. He sprang up, his eyes blazing. "I
remember everything," an inaudible voice spo