ou see,
have continued it even to this day; haven't we, my little Ojistoh?"
smiled the old hunter at his wife.

NATURE'S SANCTUARIES

One Sunday morning, when spring was all a-dance to the wondrous wild
music of the woods, I sat in the warmth of the sun and thought of my
Creator. Later, I learned that Oo-koo-hoo and Amik were also thinking
of Him; for in the wilderness one often thinks of The Master of Life.
That morning I thought, too, of the tolling of village church bells and
of cathedral chimes, and I contrasted those metallic sounds with the
beautiful singing of the birds of the forest; also I contrasted the
difference of a Sunday in the city with a Sunday in the wilderness; and
my soul rested in supreme contentment. Yet the ignorant city dwellers
think of the wilderness as "God-forsaken." Hunt the world over, and
could one find any more holy places than some of Nature's sanctuaries?
I have found many, but I shall recall but one, a certain grove on the
Alaskan border.

It was in one of the wildest of all wild regions of the northern world.
"God-forsaken" . . . indeed? In truth, it seemed to be the very home
of God. There, between the bases of two towering perpendicular ranges
of mountains, mantled by endless snows and capped by eternal ice, lay
the wildest of all box-canons: one end of which was blocked by a
barrier of snow hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet thick--the
work of countless avalanches; while the other end was blocked by a
barrier of eternal ice thousands of feet in width and millions of tons
in weight--a living and growing glacier. And there, away down at the
very bottom of that wild gorge, beside a roaring, leaping little river
of seething foam, grew a beautiful grove of trees; and never a time did
I enter there but what I thought of it as holy ground--far more holy
than any cathedral I have ever known . . . for there, in that grove,
one seemed to stand in the presence of God.

There, in that grove, the great reddish-brown boles of Sitka
spruces--four and five feet in diameter--towered up like many huge
architectural columns as they supported the ruggedly beamed and
evergreen ceiling that domed far overhead. High above an altar-like
mass of rock, completely mantled with gorgeously coloured mosses, an
opening shone in the gray-green wall, and through it filtered long
slanting beams of sunlight, as though coming through a leaded,
sky-blue, stained-glass window of some wonderful ca