The wilderness itself may never forget, as it has never forgotten beautiful Jeanne D’Arcambal, who lived and died on the shore of the great bay more than one hundred and sixty years ago.  It will never forget the great heart this woman has given to her “people” from the days of girlhood; it will not forget the thousand perils she faced to seek out the sick, the plague-stricken and the starving; in old age there will still be those who will remember the first prayers to the real God that she taught them in childhood; and children still to come, in cabin, tepee and hut, will live to bless the memory of L’ange Meleese, who made possible for them a new birthright and who in the wild places lived to the full measure and glory of the Golden Rule.

To find Meleese Cummins and her home in the wilderness, one must start at Le Pas as the last outpost of civilization and strike northward through the long Pelican Lake waterways to Reindeer Lake.  Nearly forty miles up the east shore of the lake, the adventurer will come to the mouth of the Gray Loon—­narrow and silent stream that winds under overhanging forests—­and after that a two-hours’ journey in a canoe will bring one to the Cummins’ cabin.

It is set in a clearing, with the thick spruce and balsam and cedar hemming it in, and a tall ridge capped with golden birch rising behind it.  In that clearing John Cummins raises a little fruit and a few vegetables during the summer months; but it is chiefly given up to three or four huge plots of scarlet moose-flowers, a garden of Labrador tea, and wild flowering plants and vines of half a dozen varieties.  And where the radiant moose-flowers grow thickest, screened from the view of the cabin by a few cedars and balsams, are the rough wooden slabs that mark seven graves.  Six of them are the graves of children—­little ones who died deep in the wilderness and whose tiny bodies Meleese Cummins could not leave to the savage and pitiless loneliness of the forests, but whom she has brought together that they might have company in what she calls her, “Little Garden of God.”

Those little graves tell the story of Meleese—­the woman who, all heart and soul, has buried her own one little babe in that garden of flowers.  One of the slabs marks the grave of an Indian baby, whose little dead body Meleese Cummins carried to her cabin in her own strong arms from twenty miles back in the forest, when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero.  Another of them, a baby boy, a French half-breed and his wife brought down from fifty miles up the Reindeer and begged “L’ange Meleese” to let it rest with the others, where “it might not be lonely and would not be frightened by the howl of the wolves.”  It was a wild and half Indian mother who said that!