ds to grasp.
Most of all, his was a God of strength, of mighty passions and moods,
but aloof, watchful, secluded.

In this night, and the nights that followed, she absorbed--a little at
a time--his most harboured ideas of life and nature. He did not speak
freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he
knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had
not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and
remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist.

None of his views surprised her as much as this. He knew the snows and
the cold, this man; the persecution of the elements and the endless
struggle and pain of life, yet he held no rancor. "It's all part of the
game," he explained. "It's some sort of a test, a preparation--and
there's some sort of a scheme, too big for human beings to see, behind
it."

He believed in a hereafter. He thought that the very hardship of life
made it necessary. Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he
thought: rather the tumult and stress shaped and strengthened the soul
for some stress to come. "And some of us conquer and go on," he told
her earnestly. "And some of us fall--and stop."

"But life isn't so hard," she answered. "I've never known hardship or
trial. I know many men and girls that don't know what it means."

"So much to their loss. Virginia, those people will go out of life as
soft, as unprepared, as when they came in. They will be as helpless as
when they left their mother's wombs. They haven't been disciplined.
They haven't known pain and work and battle--and the strengthening
they entail. They don't live a natural life. Nature meant for all
creatures to struggle. Because of man's civilization they are having an
artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end. Nature's way is
one of hardship."

This man did not know a gentle, kindly Nature. She was no friend of
his. He knew her as a siren, a murderess and a torturer, yet with great
secret aims that no man could name or discern. Even the kindly summer
moon lighted the way for hunting creatures to find and rend their prey.
The snow trapped the deer in the valleys where the wolf pack might find
easy killing; the cold killed the young grouse in the shrubbery; the
wind sang a song of death. He pointed out that all the wilderness
voices expressed the pain of living,--the sobbing utterance of the
coyotes, the song of the wolves in the wi