To-night the stars and the moon seemed to be more than usually brilliant.  About him the great masses of rock, the tumbling surf, the edge of the forest, and the Bay itself were illumined as if by the light of a softly radiant day.  He looked at his watch and found that it was past midnight.  He had been up since dawn, and yet he felt no touch of fatigue, no need of sleep.  He took off his cap and walked bareheaded in the mellow light, his moccasined feet falling lightly, his eyes alert to all that this wonderful night world might hold for him.  Ahead of him rose a giant mass of rock, worn smooth and slippery by the water dashed against it in the crashing storms of countless centuries, and this he climbed, panting when he reached the top.  His eyes turned to where he saw Fort Churchill sleeping along the edge of the Bay.

In that same spot, a great pool of night-glow between two forest-crowned ridges, it had lain for hundreds of years.  He passed the ancient landing-place of rocks, built a hundred and fifty years ago for the first ships that came over the strange sea; he stood upon the tumbled foundations of the Fort, that was still older, and saw the starlight glinting on one of the brass cannon that lay where it had fallen amid the debris, untouched and unmoved since the days, ages-gone, when it had last thundered its welcome or its defiance through the solitudes; he walked slowly along the shore where the sea had lashed wearily for many a year, to reach the wilderness dead, and where now, triumphant, the frothing surf bared gun-case coffins and tumbled the bones of men down into its sullen depths.  And such men!  Men who had lived and died when the world was unborn in a half of its knowledge and science, when red blood was the great capital, strong hearts the winners of life.  And there were women, too, women who had come with these men, and died with them, in the opening-up of a new world.  It was such men as these, and such women as these, that Philip loved, and he walked with bared head and swiftly beating heart over the unmarked jungle of the dead.

And then he came to other things, the first low log buildings of Churchill, to the silence of sleeping life.  New buildings loomed up—­working quarters of men who were grubbing for dollars, the new wharves, the skeletons of elevators, sullen, windowless warehouses, the office-buildings of men who were already fighting and quarreling and gripping at one another’s throats in the struggle for supremacy, for the biggest and ripest plums in this new land of opportunity.  The dollar-fight had begun, and the things that already marked its presence loomed monstrous and grotesque to Philip, as if jeering at the forgotten efforts of those whom the sea was washing away.  And suddenly it struck Philip that the sea, working ceaselessly, digging away at its dead, was not the enemy of the nameless creatures in the gun-case coffins, but that it was a friend, stanch through centuries, rescuing them now from the desecration that was to come; and for a moment he was resistless to the spirit that moved him about and made him face that sea with something that was almost a prayer in his heart.