work from behind, when no man looketh, gracefully and without offence.  Their ends are one; the difference lies in their ways, and therein the climate, and the cumulative effect thereof, is the determining factor.  Both are sinners, as men born of women have ever been; but the one does his sin openly, in the clear sight of God; the other—­as though God could not see—­veils his iniquity with shimmering fancies, hiding it like it were some splendid mystery.

These be the ways of men, each as the sun shines upon him and the wind blows against him, according to his kind, and the seed of his father, and the milk of his mother.  Each is the resultant of many forces which go to make a pressure mightier than he, and which moulds him in the predestined shape.  But, with sound legs under him, he may run away, and meet with a new pressure.  He may continue running, each new pressure prodding him as he goes, until he dies and his final form will be that predestined of the many pressures.  An exchange of cradle-babes, and the base-born slave may wear the purple imperially, and the royal infant begs an alms as wheedlingly or cringe to the lash as abjectly as his meanest subject.  A Chesterfield, with an empty belly, chancing upon good fare, will gorge as faithfully as the swine in the next sty.  And an Epicurus, in the dirt-igloo of the Eskimos, will wax eloquent over the whale oil and walrus blubber, or die.

Thus, in the young Northland, frosty and grim and menacing, men stripped off the sloth of the south and gave battle greatly.  And they stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilization—­all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues.  Maybe so; but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, and looked one another in the eyes.

And so it is not well for women, born south of fifty-three and reared gently, to knock loosely about the Northland, unless they be great of heart.  They may be soft and tender and sensitive, possessed of eyes which have not lost the lustre and the wonder, and of ears used only to sweet sounds; but if their philosophy is sane and stable, large enough to understand and to forgive, they will come to no harm and attain comprehension.  If not, they will see things and hear things which hurt, and they will suffer greatly, and lose faith in man—­which is the greatest evil that may happen them.  Such should be sedulously cherished, and it were well to depute this to their men-folk, the nearer of kin the better.  In line, it were good policy to seek out a cabin on the hill overlooking Dawson, or—­best of all—­across the Yukon on the western bank.  Let them not move abroad unheralded and unaccompanied; and the hillside back of the cabin may be recommended as a fit field for stretching muscles and breathing deeply, a place where their ears may remain undefiled by the harsh words of men who strive to the utmost.

Vance Corliss wiped the last tin dish and filed it away on the shelf, lighted his pipe, and rolled over on his back on the bunk to contemplate the moss-chinked roof of his French Hill cabin.  This French Hill cabin stood on the last dip of the hill into Eldorado Creek, close to the main-travelled trail; and its one window blinked cheerily of nights at those who journeyed late.