But there were times when the “calls” came during the husband’s absence, and, if they were urgent, Meleese went alone, trusting to her own splendid strength and courage.  A half-breed woman came to her one day, in the dead of winter, from twenty miles across the lake.  Her husband had frozen one of his feet, and the “frost malady” would kill him, she said, unless he had help.  Scarcely knowing what she could do in such a case, Meleese left a note for her husband, and on snowshoes the two heroic women set off across the wind-swept and unsheltered lake, with the thermometer fifty degrees below zero.  It was a terrible venture, but the two won out.  When Meleese saw the frozen man, she knew that there was but one thing to do, and with all the courage of her splendid heart she amputated his foot.  The torture of that terrible hour no one will ever know.  But when John Cummins returned to his home and, wild with fear, followed across the lake, he scarcely recognized the Meleese who flung herself sobbing into his arms when he found her.  For two weeks after that Meleese herself was sick.  Thus, through the course of years, it came about that it was, indeed, a stranger in the land who had not heard her name.  During the summer months Meleese’s work, in place of duty, was a pleasure.  With her husband she made canoe journeys for fifty miles about her home, hearing with her the teachings of cleanliness, of health and of God.  She was the first to hold to her own loving breast many little children who came into their wild and desolate inheritance of life.  She was the first to teach a hundred childish lips to say “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and more than one woman she made to see the clear and starry way to brighter life.

Far up on Reindeer Lake, close to the shore, there is a towering “lob-stick tree”—­which is a tall spruce or cedar lopped of all its branches to the very crest, which is trimmed in the form of a plume.  A tree thus shriven and trimmed is the Cree cenotaph to one held in almost spiritual reverence, and the tree far up on Reindeer Lake is one of the half dozen or more “lob-sticks” dedicated to Meleese.  Six weeks Meleese and John Cummins spent in an Indian camp at this point, and when at last the two bade their primitive friends good-bye and left for home, the little Indian children and the women followed their canoe along the edge of a stream and flung handfuls of flowers after them.

Of what Meleese Cummins and her husband know of the great outside world, or of what they do not know, it is wisest to leave unsaid.  Details have often marred a picture.  They are children of the wilderness, born of that wilderness, bred of it, and life of it—­a beating and palpitating part of a world which few can understand.  I doubt if one or the other has ever heard of a William Shakespeare or a Tennyson, for it has not been in my mind or desire to ask; but they do know the human heart as it beats and throbs in a land that is desolation and loneliness, where