knew, on the next
turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and fairy-like,
with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacocks
on the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the
cooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my
husband--I'd hear Jake sayin', "Why ain't you served them beans? Think I
can wait here all day!" Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come to
it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my
throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before I
could lay him out with the potato stomper.

"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but
it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born for
cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days, but
I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me.
I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I
guess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."

Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself some
thread of thought.

"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe of
wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting territory. And
it happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might have
lived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the
vision.' That was all she needed, and she got it.

"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap of
newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.' And
then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:

"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are
to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is
not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness
of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons
are strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The
Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to
be of equal antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'

"That's what she did, repeate