hland,
and in spite of the death-grip that was tightening in his chest he
drank it in deeply and leaned over so that his eyes traveled over wide
spaces of the world that had been his only a short time before.

It occurred to him that he had suggested this knoll that overlooked
both settlement and river as the site for the building which Dr.
Cardigan called his hospital. It was a structure rough and unadorned,
unpainted, and sweetly smelling with the aroma of the spruce trees from
the heart of which its unplaned lumber was cut. The breath of it was a
thing to bring cheer and hope. Its silvery walls, in places golden and
brown with pitch and freckled with knots, spoke joyously of life that
would not die, and the woodpeckers came and hammered on it as though it
were still a part of the forest, and red squirrels chattered on the
roof and scampered about in play with a soft patter of feet.

"It's a pretty poor specimen of man that would die up here with all
that under his eyes," Kent had said a year before, when he and Cardigan
had picked out the site. "If he died looking at that, why, he just
simply ought to die, Cardigan," he had laughed.

And now he was that poor specimen, looking out on the glory of the
world!

His vision took in the South and a part of the East and West, and in
all those directions there was no end of the forest. It was like a
vast, many-colored sea with uneven billows rising and falling until the
blue sky came down to meet them many miles away. More than once his
heart ached at the thought of the two thin ribs of steel creeping up
foot by foot and mile by mile from Edmonton, a hundred and fifty miles
away. It was, to him, a desecration, a crime against Nature, the murder
of his beloved wilderness. For in his soul that wilderness had grown to
be more than a thing of spruce and cedar and balsam, of poplar and
birch; more than a great, unused world of river and lake and swamp. It
was an individual, a thing. His love for it was greater than his love
for man. It was his inarticulate God. It held him as no religion in the
world could have held him, and deeper and deeper it had drawn him into
the soul of itself, delivering up to him one by one its guarded secrets
and its mysteries, opening for him page by page the book that was the
greatest of all books. And it was the wonder of it now, the fact that
it was near him, about him, embracing him, glowing for him in the
sunshine, whispering to him in the soft