this is Jasper Park; that it consists
of 5,450 square miles, and that it is held in perpetuity for the
nation. I should ask, "Why do they call it Jasper Park?" and you, my
fine fellow-farer, should tell me how old Jasper Hawes was one of "the
gentlemen adventurers" of the Hudson's Bay Company, and doubtless a
purposeful man and clever. "But why do they call this defile 'the
Yellow Head Pass?'" I should further query, whereupon you ought to
reply, "I perceive you are an untaught person else you had heard how
this Jasper Hawes had hair the colour of September wheat in the sheaf,
so that the Indians called him 'Tete Jaune' or 'Yellow Head,' much
after our mischievous manner of turning about on the street to look
after a lady who is flaxen."

Yes! we should say all this, and more, but it might sound like the
private car "write-up," so we had better not. Besides, our engine has
come to a sit-still and will not go a step farther. The gossip we
heard at Bickerdike about the wash-out has been verified. The
officials in the private car are in no very graceful temper over this
landslide, and some of the men on the firing-line who dug and blasted
and built the grade, are going to have their hearts cut out because of
it.

The trouble is that these vastly particular officials conceive of the
mountain into whose body they have slashed as a dead thing--dead as
pickled pork--whereas it is splendidly alive. Because of the malapert
efforts of the builders, the mountain has shaken its monstrous sides
with laughter till the tears ran adown its face and washed out their
puny sticks and stones. One might hint this to the officials, but one
is scared to. They belong to the unamiable sex and are showing an
anger highly disproportioned to the cause. Indeed, I saw a very
special official put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth. Sometime
to-night, a few flat cars will come from the End of Steel to convey the
gang thither. The gang will climb up one side of the wash-out and down
the other, and I will too, if the train's agent will let me, but from
his hard-baked, non-committal manner, I glean he is predetermined to
take me back to Edson in the caboose.

The men have lighted a fire in the hills, and this fire seems to be the
kernel of the land. Strange elemental figures appear and disappear in
the darkness as though they were performing unnamed, unholy rites.
They seem human but, perhaps, they are spirits, for I have some
splendi