ce, it denies you access to
the abundance that mocks you in every shop window, and bars you out of
the houses that line the streets. Here, everything needful is yours
for the taking. If one is ignorant, or unable to convert wood and
water and game to his own uses, he must learn how, or pay the penalty
of incompetence. No, little person, I don't think the law of life is
nearly so harsh here as it is where the mob struggles for its daily
bread. It's more open and aboveboard here; more up to the individual.
But it's lonely sometimes. I guess that's what ails you."

"Oh, pouf!" she denied. "I'm not lonely, so long as I've got you. But
sometimes I think of something happening to you--sickness and
accidents, and all that. One can't help thinking what might happen."

"Forget it!" Bill exhorted. "That's the worst of living in this big,
still country--it makes one introspective, and so confoundedly
conscious of what puny atoms we human beings are, after all. But
there's less chance of sickness here than any place. Anyway, we've got
to take a chance on things now and then, in the course of living our
lives according to our lights. We're playing for a stake--and things
that are worth having are never handed to us on a silver salver.
Besides, I never had worse than a stomachache in my life and you're a
pretty healthy specimen yourself. Wait till I get that cabin built,
with a big fireplace at one end. We'll be more comfortable, and things
will look a little rosier. This thing of everlasting hurry and hard
work gets on anybody's nerves."

The best of the afternoon was still unspent when the haystacking
terminated, and Bill declared a holiday. He rigged a line on a limber
willow wand, and with a fragment of venison for bait sought the pools
of the stream which flowed out the south opening. He prophesied that
in certain black eddies plump trout would be lurking, and he made his
prophecy good at the first pool. Hazel elected herself gun-bearer to
the expedition, but before long Bill took up that office while she
snared trout after trout from the stream--having become something of an
angler herself under Bill's schooling. And when they were frying the
fish that evening he suddenly observed:

"Say, they were game little fellows, these, weren't they? Wasn't that
better sport than taking a street car out to the park and feeding the
swans?"

"What an idea!" she laughed. "Who wants to feed swans in a park?"

But w