At Duluth, at Sault de Ste. Marie, at Mackinaw, at Saginaw, we wandered away days at a time, with nothing but our birch canoe, rifles, and fishing-rods, and for provisions, hard bread, pork, potatoes, coffee, tea, rice, butter, and sugar, closely packed.  Any camper-out can make himself comfortable with an outfit as simple as the one named.  How memory clings around some of those bright spots we visited!  I pass over them again, in thought, as I write these lines, longing to nestle amid them forever.

Following along the coast, now in small yachts hired for the occasion, now in a birch canoe of our own, we passed from one village to another.  Wherever we happened to be at night, we encamped.  Many a time it was on a lonely shore.  Standing at sunset on a pleasant strand, more than once we saw the glow of the vanished sun behind the western mountains or the western waves, darkly piled in mist and shadow along the sky; near at hand, the dead pine, mighty in decay, stretching its ragged arms athwart the burning heavens, the crow perched on its top like an image carved in jet; and aloft, the night-hawk, circling in his flight, and, with a strange whining sound, diving through the air each moment for the insects he makes his prey.

But all good things, as well as others, have an end.  The season drew to a close at last.  August nights are chilly for sleeping in tents.  Our flitting must cease, and our thoughts and steps turn homeward.  But a few days are still left us.  At Buffalo once more we go to see the Falls.  Then by boat to Hamilton, thence to Kingston at the foot of the lake, and so on through the Thousand Isles to Montreal, and finally to Quebec,—­a tour as fascinating in its innumerable and singularly wild and beautiful “sights” as heart could desire.

* * * * *

OUR NATIONAL CEMETERIES.

By Charles Cowley, LL.D.

There are circumstances generally attending the death of the soldier or the sailor, whether on battle-field or gun-deck, whether in the captives’ prison, the cockpit, or the field-hospital, which touch our sensibilities far more deeply than any circumstances which usually attend the death of men of any other class; moving within us mingled emotions of pathos and pity, of mystery and awe.

  “There is a tear for all that die,
    A mourner o’er the humblest grave;
  But nations swell the funeral cry,
    And freedom weeps above the brave;

  “For them is sorrow’s purest sigh,
    O’er ocean’s heaving bosom sent;
  In vain their bones unburied lie,—­
    All earth becomes their monument.

  “A tomb is their’s on every page;
    An epitaph on every tongue;
  The present hours, the future age,
    Nor them bewail, to them belong.

  “A theme to crowds that knew them not,
    Lamented by admiring foes,
  Who would not share their glorious lot? 
    Who would not die the death they chose?”