poetry runs not in lines and meters, but in the bloom of the wild flower, the rush of the rapid, the thunder of the waterfall and the murmuring of the wind in the spruce tops; where drama exists not in the epic lines of literature, but in the hunt cry of the wolf, the death dirges of the storms that wail down from the Barrens, and in the strange cries that rise up out of the silent forests, where for a half of each year life is that endless strife that leaves behind only those whom we term the survival of the fittest.

THE CASE OF BEAUVAIS

Madness?  Perhaps.  And yet if it was madness. . . .

But strange things happen up there, gentlemen.  I have found it sometimes hard to define that word.  There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just.  It is so.  Yes.  A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us—­but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.

But I will tell you the story.  That is what you want to hear, and you expect that it will be prejudiced—­that I will either deliberately attempt to protect and prolong a human life, or shorten and destroy it.  I shall do neither, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police.  I have a faith in you that is in its way an unbounded as my faith in God.  I have looked up to you in all my life in the wilderness as the heart of chivalry and the soul of honor and fairness to all men.  Pathfinders, men of iron, guardians of people and spaces of which civilization knows but little, I have taught my children of the forests to honor, obey and to trust you.  And so I shall tell you the story without prejudice, with the gratitude of a missioner who has lived his life for forty years in the wilderness, gentlemen.

I am a Catholic.  It is four hundred miles straight north by dog-sledge or snowshoe to my cabin, and this is the first time in nineteen years that I have been down to the edge of the big world which I remember now as little more than a dream.  But up there I knew that my duty lay, just at the edge of the Big Barren.  See!  My hands are knotted like the snarl of a tree.  The glare of your lights hurts my eyes.  I traveled to-day in the middle of your street because my moccasined feet stumbled on the smoothness of your walks.  People stared, and some of them laughed.

Forty years I have lived in another world.  You—­and especially you gentlemen who have trailed in the Patrols of the north—­know what that world is.  As it shapes different hands, as it trains different feet, as it gives to us different eyes, so also it has bred into my forest children hearts and souls that may be a little different, and a code of right and wrong that too frequently has had no court of law to guide it.  So judge fairly, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police!  Understand, if you can.