figures were clothed or what they were.  Only he knew they were not men.  He did not even think of ghosts.  All he knew was it was a death fire, a death silence, death tepees, death figures.  He fled through the woods knowing only death was behind him—­running and running, and never stopping till he dropped exhausted across the fort doorstep at two in the morning.  He blurted out why he had come.  Then he lapsed unconscious.  They filled him with rum.  It was twenty-four hours before he could speak.

“I don’t know these modern theories about hallucination and delusions and things,” concluded Mr. Hall, gazing reflectively on the memories of that night.  “I’m not much on romance and that kind of thing!  I don’t believe in ghosts.  I don’t know what it was.  All I know is it scared me so it saved my life, and it saved the lives of the rest, too; for the relief party got out in time, though they didn’t see a sign of any Indian camp.  I don’t know what to make of it, unless years ago some Indian camp had been starved or massacred there, and owing to my unusual condition I got into some clairvoyant connection with that past.  However, there it is; and it would take a pretty strong argument to persuade me I didn’t see anything.  All the other things I thought I saw on that trip certainly existed, and it would be a queer thing if the one thing which saved my life did not exist.  That’s all I know, and you can make anything you like of it.”

So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the North sends down something more than roaring winds—­though winds are good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees.  Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals.  It rears a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation.  A man who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will “come out”—­as they say in the North—­and study medicine at her own expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives—­are not types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate.  Canada will do things in the world of nations shortly.  She may do them rough-handed; but what she does will depend on the national ideals she nurtures to-day; and into those ideals has entered the spirit of the Domain of the North.

CHAPTER XVIII

FINDING HERSELF

I