vast voids of the sky, with their blue and
gold, and blue and silver. Or it may be that Tornarsuk, the great
devil of the Arctic, who rides on the wind, steals from their breasts
the midget souls of humans so that they belong to him and must follow
whither he wills. It is not for me to know the reason, or to tell it
to you, for I am southron born and cannot construe aright.

Time was when this woman only tasted flour once a year. It was in New
Year's Day, when her mother baked cakes for the gentlemen who came to
pay their respects to her--the doctor, the missionary, the clerks at
the post, or the visitors from other posts. On the first of these
occasions her mother, with an ill-grounded confidence, passed the plate
of cakes to the earliest visitors so that there were no cakes left for
the callers who came afterwards.

When flour became more plentiful, it was her mother's custom to have
cakes every Sunday evening. A cake was baked for each member of the
family and one for the plate. No one dreamed of taking the last cake.
It would have been accounted a gross breach of etiquette to have done
so, and one not to be thought of.

"But what became of it?" I ask; "who ate it ultimately? Surely some
one knew?"

Apparently no one did, for I am answered by a lift of one shoulder,
suggestive of ignorance and possibly indifference--a little defensive
shrug which precludes further intrusion into the subject. It is unkind
of her to leave me with this worrying problem, for there are fifty-two
cakes a year to be disposed of, and I may never hope to dispose of them
alone.

The Indian woman who has the white husband gives me bon-bons from a box
she purchased in Edmonton last week. Nothing so makes for confidence
in women as to eat sweets together. Authors write much about breaking
bread and the sacredness of salt, but, in actual life, nothing cements
friendship like chocolate drops. This is why the woman opens her heart
to me and says she desires to write a book--a great book about the
white people of whom she knows many things. I have no doubt she does,
and that if she put down all that is in her heart without one glance at
the gallery and without trimming her language to the rules of syntax,
her book would be the literary sensation of the year.

She wants to know if ever I wrote a book. Now, once I did, but it was
a simple book, so that wise people did not care so much as one finger's
fillip for it, but, sometime, I