e better; he was accustomed,
too, to poke his thumb into the dead plumage of a plump grouse when
Malcourt's men laid out the braces, on which he himself never drew
trigger; and which interested him only when on the table.

He wanted plenty of game and fish on the place for that reason; he
wanted his guests to shoot and fish for that reason, too. Otherwise he
cared nothing for his deer, his grouse, and his trout. And why he
suddenly had been bitten with a mania for "improving" the flawless
wilderness about him, even Malcourt did not know.

Hamil, therefore, was prepared for a simple yet difficult problem--to do
as little harm to the place as possible, and to appease Portlaw at the
same time, and curb his meddlesome and iconoclastic proclivities.

Spring had begun early in the North; shallow snows were fading from the
black forest soil along the streams' edges, and from the pebbled shores
of every little lake; already the soft ice was afloat on pool and pond;
muskrats swam; the eggs of the woodcock were beginning their chilly
incubation; and in one sheltered spring-hole behind the greenhouse
Malcourt discovered a solemn frog afloat. It takes only a single frog to
make the spring-time.

That week the trailing fragrance of arbutus hung over wet hollows along
the hills; and at night, high in the starlight, the thrilling clangour
of wild geese rang out--the truest sky-music of the North among all the
magic folk-songs of the wild.

The anchor-ice let go and went out early, and a few pioneer trout jumped
that week; the cock-grouse, magnificent in his exquisite puffed ruff,
paced the black-wet drumming log, and the hollow woodlands throbbed all
day with his fairy drumming.

On hard-wood ridges every sugar-bush ran sap; the aroma from fire and
kettle sweetened the air; a few battered, hibernating butterflies
crawled out of cracks and crannies and sat on the sap-pans sunning
their scarlet-banded wings.

And out of the hot South into the fading silver of this chill Northern
forest-world came Hamil, sunburned, sombre-eyed, silent.

Malcourt met him at Pride's Fall with a buckboard and a pair of
half-broken little Morgans; and away they tore into the woods,
scrambling uphill, plunging downhill, running away most of the time to
the secret satisfaction of Malcourt, who cared particularly for what was
unsafe in life.

He looked sideways at Hamil once or twice, and, a trifle disappointed
that the pace seemed to suit him, let t