progress as God meant progress to be.  I am saying this because I want you to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them.  You may find up there the last chapter in life, as it was largely intended that life should be in the beginning of things.  And I want you to understand it, because in your books you possess a power which should be well directed.  When I received your last letter I hunted up the best man I knew as guide and companion for you—­old Rameses, down at the Mission.  He is called Rameses because he looks like the old boy himself.  You said you wanted to learn Cree, and he’ll teach it to you.  He will teach you a lot of other things, and when you look at him, especially at night beside the campfire, you will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the first people.”

Roscoe, at thirty-two, had not lost his boy’s enthusiasm in life, in spite of the fact that he had studied too deeply, and had seen too much, and had begun fighting for existence while still in bare feet.  From the beginning it seemed as though some grim monster of fate had hovered about him, making his path as rough as it could, and striking him down whenever the opportunity came.  His own tremendous energy and ambition had carried him to the top.

He worked himself through college, and became a success in his way.  But at no time could he remember real happiness.  It had almost come to him, he thought, a year before—­in the form of a girl; but this promise had passed like the others because, of a sudden, he found that she had shattered the most precious of all his ideals.  So he picked himself up, and, encouraged by his virile optimism, began looking forward again.  Bad luck had so worked its hand in the moulding of him that he had come to live chiefly in anticipation, and though this bad luck had played battledore and shuttlecock with him, the things which he anticipated were pleasant and beautiful.  He believed that the human race was growing better, and that each year was bringing his ideals just so much nearer to realization.  More than once he had told himself that he was living two or three centuries too soon.  Ransom, his old college chum, had been the first to suggest that he was living some thousands of years too late.

He thought of this a great deal during the first pleasant weeks of the autumn, which he and old Rameses spent up in the Lac la Ronge and Reindeer Lake country.  During this time he devoted himself almost entirely to the study of Cree under Rameses’ tutelage, and the more he learned of it the more he saw the truth of what Ransom had told him once upon a time, that the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world.  At the upper end of the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who were weaving reed baskets.  They talked so quickly that he could understand but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music.  He had learned French in Paris, and had heard Italian in Rome, but never in his life had he heard words or voices so beautiful as those which fell from the red, full lips of the Cree girls.  He thought more seriously than ever of what Ransom had said about the first people, and the beginning of things.