“Ultima Thule, B.C., March 1st. 1915.

“My Dear Wife: 

“You will see by the heading of this letter that fortune has cast me off at Ashcroft, and I must congratulate myself for initiating that rolling stone ‘stunt.’  I have stumbled upon the richest mine in B.C.  The gold is sticking out of it in chunks.  The auto that you will play when you arrive will be a ‘hum dinger’ and no mistake.  I am enclosing my cheque for $500.  Buy out Tim Eaton and bring your dear self here, for I am lonely without you.

  “Your hitherto demented husband.”

She read it fifty times, placed it next her heart and pranced about like a five-year-old.  “Now, just where is Ashcroft?” she soliloquized.  None of the Bruce county aborigines seemed to know, so she consulted a world map, and she found it growing like a parasite to the Canadian Pacific Railway away in among the mountains of British Columbia.

But this was nothing.  She would have risked a journey over the Atlantic in an aeroplane if it were a means of uniting her with the man who was the only masculine human in existence so far as she was concerned—­the man whom she had singled out and adopted from among the millions of his kind.  When they met the union was pathetic, but it was lovely.  To make a woman happy, who loves you like this, should be the consummation of a man’s domestic ambitions.

It was pointed out to him afterwards that, after all, the moss did not begin to grow until he had settled down in Ashcroft.  So he lost his knighthood as an iconoclast.

Of Cultus Johnny

Once upon a time at Spence’s Bridge, County of Yale, Province of British Columbia, on the Indian reserve, there lived two Indians named Cultus (bad) Johnny and Hias (big) Peter.  They were friends until Peter got married, and then the trouble began, because they both wanted the same klootchman.  They had been fishing for some time for the same fish, in the same pool in the Thompson river, and had each been favored with very encouraging nibbles.  One day, however, Peter felt the tugging at his bait somewhat stronger than usual and with one jerk he pulled out his fish.  Peter had stolen a march on his rival.  The priest married them when Johnny was at the coast, fishing at New Westminster for the canneries.  When the intelligence reached him he sat down in the bottom of the boat and for a few moments imagined himself at Spence’s Bridge giving Hias Peter a Jack Johnson trouncing.  To Cultus Johnny the strange preference of this woman for his rival seemed like unmitigated discrimination.  Why, there was no comparison between the two when it came to worldly icties.  Peter had nothing:  he had no illiha, no icties of any kind; he was broke morning, noon and night.  Johnny had a sixty dollar saddle, a five dollar bridle, a two and a half quirt and the best cayuse in Spence’s Bridge, and worth seventy-five