floor, where there is music, and dancing, and love-making.
It is a pretty play even to the onlooker. Or in the big central
rotunda, which is the heart of this hostelry in the hills, she will
find "there is always fine weather," and "the good fellows" are from
all over the world and have strange stories to tell Canadian folk who
stay in the North. In the cavernous fireplace, spruce logs burn redly,
and by their light you may decipher the words on the mantelpiece: "The
world is my school; travel our teacher; Nature our book, and God our
friend." Overhead, in the fourth gallery, a deep-voiced singer is
taking us into captivity. Listen, then, for it is only in music that
critics are taken captive: literature has no such thraldom. It is
about a perfect day that the singer sings, and this is what she says--

"And this is the end of a perfect day,
Near the end of a journey too;
But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
With a wish that is kind and true.
For Memory has painted this perfect day
With colours that never fade,
And we find at the end of a perfect day
The soul of a friend we've made."

CHAPTER XXV

THE OVERLAND TRAIL OF '98

Out of the North there rang a cry of Gold!--TOM McINNES.

Only this spring, a widow near Edmonton sold her quarter-section to a
real-estate syndicate for eighty thousand dollars. She was one of the
women who "stayed at home with the stuff" while her husband fared forth
in search of gold at the time of the Klondike stampede in 1897-8. He
died on the trail, and ever since the woman has ploughed the lone
furrow both literally and metaphorically.

The handsome reward of her industry and pertinacity calls to mind that
fable of AEsop's where the young men found that the hidden treasure
their father had described to them was in the yield the soil had given
after they had industriously digged it over.

We were talking about this the other night, and the humour and
tragedies of the gold stampede, over the last bottle of
champagne---positively the last--that remained of the most prolonged
and celebrated spree that ever took place in the North. The vintage
was a _Koch Fils_ of 1892 and, therefore (to save your mental
arithmetic), I may add, twenty-one years old. It was brought in by the
Helpman Expedition, familiarly known to the local wiseacres of the day
as "The Helpless Proposition."

Did it taste well?

I do not know.

I like lemonade with