se; also many hot rolls sopped in butter, and yellow honey in
its comb.

This is a ramblesome bungalow and very comfortable. Musical
instruments, couches, big cushions, book-shelves and pictures take on a
peculiar attractiveness when they are the only ones in a hundred miles
or more.

After supper we read _Phil-o-rum Juneau_, by William Henry Drummond,
and discussed its relation to the French Canadian legend, _La
Chasse-Gallerie_. Of all our Canadian legends, I like it the best, and
it may happen that you will too. It tells how on each New Year's Night
the spirits of the woodsmen and rivermen are carried in phantom canoes
from these lonely northlands back to the old homesteads in the south,
where, unseen and undisturbed, they mingle with their friends. The
father embraces his children; the lover his maiden, the husband his
wife, and once more the son lays his head on his mother's lap. All of
the voyageurs join the feast, the song, and the dance, so that no man
is lonely in those hours, neither is he weary or sad. It is a better
thing, I make believe, than even the communion of saints. But just
before the dawn comes, the wraith men find themselves back on the
Athabasca, the Mackenzie and the Slave, and no one speaks of where he
has been, or of what he experienced, for all this he must keep hidden
in his heart.

When, over a century ago, the legend first sprang to life, there were
none save men to travel like this, but now, of times, a woman may
travel too. I know this for a certainty in that each New Year's Night
I go myself. In my dug-out canoe--delved from wishful thoughts and
things like that--I take my hurried way across prodigious seas of ice
where never living foot has fallen; adown ill-noted trails through
silver trees; by hidden caverns that are the lairs of the running
winds; over dark forests of pine and across uncounted leagues of white
prairies which light up the darkness, till I come to the warmer
southland, where youths and maidens make wreaths of greenery, and where
mellow-voiced bells ring out the dying year.

And when those who are my own people feel their hearts to be of a
sudden rifled of love; that some one has brushed their cheek, or that a
head is resting on their shoulder, then do they know the exile has come
back, for I have told them it will be thus.

And you, O my readers of the Seven Seas, now that we are friends and
know each other closely, will you of New Year's Night be keenly