am, was a voice of weeping and complaint.

For us the loss meant a hard day's work, scrambling over slippery
stones, and splashing through puddles, and forcing a way through the
tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleasant two hours' run on
a swift current. We ate our dinner on a sandbank in what was once the
middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the sun was sinking, a narrow
wooded gorge between the hills, completely filled by a chain of small
lakes, where travelling became easy and pleasant. The steep shores,
clothed with cedar and black spruce and dark-blue fir-trees, rose sheer
from the water; the passage from lake to lake was a tiny rapid a few
yards long, gurgling through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain there
was a longer rapid, with a portage beside it. We emerged from the dense
bush suddenly and found ourselves face to face with Lake Tchitagama.

How the heart expands at such a view! Nine miles of shining water lay
stretched before us, opening through the mountains that guarded it on
both sides with lofty walls of green and gray, ridge over ridge, point
beyond point, until the vista ended in

"You orange sunset waning slow."

At a moment like this one feels a sense of exultation. It is a new
discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed to
each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled
with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen
that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it
again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a
touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious
memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find
another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it
forever.

Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the sunrise end of the lake, in a
bay paved with small round stones, laid close together and beaten firmly
down by the waves. There, and along the shores below, at the mouth of a
little river that foamed in over a ledge of granite, and in the shadow
of cliffs of limestone and feldspar, we trolled and took many fish: pike
of enormous size, fresh-water sharks, devourers of nobler game, fit
only to kill and throw away; huge old trout of six or seven pounds,
with broad tails and hooked jaws, fine fighters and poor food; stupid,
wide-mouthed chub--ouitouche, the Indians call them--biting at hooks