CHAPTER I

BEACH DAYS

When a soldier's watch, with its luminous face,
Loses its light and grows dim and black,
He holds it out in the sun a space
And the radiance all comes back;
And that is the reason I'm thinking to-day
Of the glad days now long past;
I am leaving my heart where the sunbeams play:
I am trying to drive my fears away:
I am charging my soul with a spirit gay,
And hoping that it will last!

We were the usual beach crowd, with our sport suits, our silk
sweaters, our Panama hats, our veranda teas and week-end guests, our
long, lovely, lazy afternoons in hammocks beside the placid waters of
Lake Winnipeg. Life was easy and pleasant, as we told ourselves life
ought to be in July and August, when people work hard all year and
then come away to the quiet greenness of the big woods, to forget the
noise and dust of the big city.

We called our cottage "Kee-am," for that is the Cree word which means
"Never mind"--"Forget it"--"I should worry!" and we liked the name.
It had a romantic sound, redolent of the old days when the Indians
roamed through these leafy aisles of the forest, and it seemed more
fitting and dignified than "Rough House," where dwelt the quietest
family on the beach, or "Dunwurkin" or "Neverdunfillin" or "Takitezi,"
or any of the other more or less home-made names. We liked our name so
well that we made it, out of peeled poles, in wonderful rustic
letters, and put it up in the trees next the road.

Looking back now, we wonder what we had to worry about! There was
politics, of course; we had just had a campaign that warmed up our
little province, and some of the beachites were not yet speaking to
each other; but nobody had been hurt and nobody was in jail.

Religion was not troubling us: we went dutifully every Sunday to the
green-and-white schoolhouse under the tall spruce trees, and heard a
sermon preached by a young man from the college, who had a deep and
intimate knowledge of Amos and Elisha and other great men long dead,
and sometimes we wished he would tell us more about the people who
are living now and leave the dead ones alone. But it is always safer
to speak of things that have happened long ago, and aspersions may be
cast with impunity on Ahab and Jezebel and Balak. There is no danger
that they will have friends on the front seat, who will stop their
subscriptions to the building fund because they do not believe in
having politics introduce