re bright with gold, relieved
only by the deep sombre green of pines and hemlocks. Save for these,
it seemed a country that some gracious Midas had touched, turning
everything to ethereal, elfin gold.

The Midas-touch had even included the little log-cabin and its untidy
clearing, for broad-disced sunflowers were scattered over the neglected
garden, and between them bloomed late goldenrod, which had crept in
from the wilds outside; and a small patch of ground was covered with
shocks of Indian corn, roughly bound together, yellowing also beneath
the influence of sun and frost.

The land was beautiful to look upon--Ontario scenery, marred little by
the works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious Majesty
George IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing were
picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack
of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the
garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up
into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and
seeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrels
would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the
birds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and left
through their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulus
vines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and the
few shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few of
these fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother and
kill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of the
woman who had cherished them.

In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees,
heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a little
hollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy was
lying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of the
forests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim his
English birth. His clothes were of very coarse homespun, and he wore a
pair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudy
Indian-work of beads and dyed grasses. The whole clearing was crying
out for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from the
encroaching wilderness; but this sturdy lad lay there with all the busy
idleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark.
He seemed a fit occupant for the tang