“They dance not for me,
Yet mine is their glee! 
Thus pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;
Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,
Moves all nature to gladness and mirth.”

But our later thoughts of the lumbermen were not altogether grateful, when we arrived that day, after a mile of portage, at the little Riviere Blanche, upon which we had counted to float us down to Lac Tchitagama, and found that they had stolen all its water to float their logs down the Lake of the Bear.  The poor little river was as dry as a theological novel.  There was nothing left of it except the bed and the bones; it was like a Connecticut stream in the middle of August.  All its pretty secrets were laid bare; all its music was hushed.  The pools that lingered among the rocks seemed like big tears; and the voice of the forlorn rivulets that trickled in here and there, seeking the parent stream, was a voice of weeping and complaint.

For us the loss meant a hard day’s work, scrambling over slippery stones, and splashing through puddles, and forcing a way through the tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleasant two hours’ run on a swift current.  We ate our dinner on a sandbank in what was once the middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the sun was sinking, a narrow wooded gorge between the hills, completely filled by a chain of small lakes, where travelling became easy and pleasant.  The steep shores, clothed with cedar and black spruce and dark-blue fir-trees, rose sheer from the water; the passage from lake to lake was a tiny rapid a few yards long, gurgling through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain there was a longer rapid, with a portage beside it.  We emerged from the dense bush suddenly and found ourselves face to face with Lake Tchitagama.

How the heart expands at such a view!  Nine miles of shining water lay stretched before us, opening through the mountains that guarded it on both sides with lofty walls of green and gray, ridge over ridge, point beyond point, until the vista ended in

     “You orange sunset waning slow.”

At a moment like this one feels a sense of exultation.  It is a new discovery of the joy of living.  And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy.  Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision?  Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again?  Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s loveliness?  It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve.  It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise.  It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever.