from the cruel, ragged coast with its unceasing turmoil of hungry waves breaking upon the cliffs.  Here there reigned such a wonderful peace, interrupted only by the song of birds.  There were soft outlines in the distance, and everywhere the scent of balsams.  Of course it was all very desolate; a vast swamp dominated by sterile ridges of boulder-strewn hills; an immense land of peat-bogs and mosses, grey and green and purplish, upon which only the caribou and the birds appeared able to live.  Yet it was no longer a place where the fury of the elements was ever ready to unchain itself against poor people clinging to their bare rocks.  The breath of one’s nostrils went ever so deep in one’s lungs, and one’s muscles seemed to gather energy and respond ever so much more efficiently than they ever did in big towns.

“I don’t think I ever before realized the beauty of great waste places,” I said.  “It looks like a world infinite and wonderful, over which we might be traveling in quest of some Holy Grail that should be hidden away beyond those pink and mauve mountains.”

The doctor smiled, in his quiet way.

“Yes,” he said.  “One feels as if one could understand the true purpose of living, which should be the constant effort to attain something ever so glorious that lies beyond, always beyond.”

I wonder just what he meant by that, Aunt Jennie?

Soon our little caravan went on, and we began to see many tracks of caribou, chiefly does and fawns.  In low swampy places we several times came across old wind-and rain-bleached antlers, shed in the late fall of the previous year.

We had traveled for a couple of hours since luncheon when we stopped for another breathing spell.  Sammy was explaining the lie of the country to the doctor, who nodded.  Then the latter showed me a tiny valley where ran, amid a tangle of alders and dwarf trees, a large brook that wandered slowly, with many curves, to join the river far away on our right.

“At this time of the year there is not much chance of finding a stag in the open,” he said.  “They remain in places like that, hidden in the alders until it is time for them to wander off and make up their family parties.  Are you very tired, Miss Jelliffe?”

I assured him that I was still feeling ever so fit.

“We are only about a mile and a half from the place where we are to camp for the night,” he told me.  “The others will go there and get things ready.  Frenchy can return here for my pack.  If you would like to come with me and hunt along the brook we should make it a somewhat longer journey, owing to the many bends, but we should have a chance of getting a stag.”

Of course I told him that I should like it ever so much, and we made our way down a slope while the others continued along the ridge.  Indeed I was not tired at all.  Notwithstanding the sodden moss in which our feet had been sinking for hours, and the peaty black ooze that held one back, I had no trouble in following Dr. Grant, who was carefully picking out the best going.