nd challenged death. Death! Curse death! What had we to fear from
dying? Had we not more to fear from living? At that came thought of my
love and the tumult against life was quieted. I, too, like other
mortals, had reason, the best of reason, to fear death. What matter if a
lonely one like myself went out alone to the great dark? But when
thought of my love came, a desolating sense of separation--separation
not to be bridged by love or reason--overwhelmed me, and I, too, shrank
back.

Again I peered forward. The shadow fluttered, moved, and came out of the
gloom, a tender presence with massy, golden hair, white-veined brow, and
gray eyes, speaking unutterable things.

"My beloved!" I cried. "Oh, my beloved!" and I sprang towards her; but
she had glided back among the spectral branches.

The candle tumbled to the floor, extinguishing all light, and I was
alone with the sick man breathing heavily in the darkness. A log broke
over the fire. The flames burst up again; but I was still alone. Had I,
too, lost grip of reality; or was she in distress calling for me?
Neither suggestion satisfied; for the mean lodge was suddenly filled
with a great calm, and my whole being was flooded and thrilled with the
trancing ecstasy of an ethereal presence.

If I remember rightly--and to be perfectly frank, I do--though I was in
as desperate straits as a man could be, I lay before the hearth that
Christmas Eve filled with gratitude to heaven--God knows such a gift
must have come from heaven!--for the love with which I had been dowered.

How it might have been with other men I know not. For myself, I could
not have come through that dreary winter unscathed without the influence
of her, who would have been the first to disclaim such power. Among the
velvet cushions of the east one may criticise the lapse of white man to
barbarity; but in the wilderness human voice is as grateful to the ear
as rain patter in a drouth. There, men deal with facts, not arguments.
Natives break the loneliness of an isolated life by not unwelcomed
visits. Comes a time when they tarry over long in the white man's lodge.
Other men, who have scouted the possibility of sinking to savagery, have
forsaken the ways of their youth. Who can say that I might not have
departed from the path called rectitude?

Religion may keep a holy man upright in slippery places; but for common
mortals, devotion to a being, whom, in one period of their worship men
rank with angels, d