“Yes,” replied Mrs. Anderson, “Trig has done very well.  He gets six dollars a week now, and Dudley, you know, gets ten.”  Then with pardonable asperity she added: 

“Archie is doing a little better, however; he’s getting seventy-five dollars a week to start on.  He has already paid his father back every copper spent on his tuition.”

“Archie!  Seventy-five dollars a week!  Why, he is hardly seventeen!  How ever did he do it?” exclaimed the visitor.

“Hock, dear loyal old Hock, says it’s because Archie is the very best boy in the world,” replied Mrs. Anderson, laughingly, “but I say it was the result of a broken string.”

Maurice of His Majesty’s Mails

Old Maurice Delorme boasted the blood of many nations; his “bulldog” grit came to him from an English sea-captain, a bluff, genial old tar whom he could recall as being his “grand-daddy” sixty years ago; his gay, rollicking love of laughter and song came to him through his half French father; his love of wood and water lore, his endurance, his gift of strategy, were his birthright directly from his Red Indian mother; consequently there was but one place in the world where such a trinity of nationalities could be fostered in one man, but one place where that man could breathe and be happy, and that place was amid the struggling heights and the yawning canyons of the Rocky Mountains.

Years before Canada had constructed her world-famous transcontinental railroad, which now stretches its belt of steel from Atlantic to Pacific, Maurice Delorme set out for the golden West, working his way across the vast Canadian half of the American continent.  He had done everything for a living—­that is, everything that was honorable, for his British-French-Indian blood was the blood of honest forefathers, and he prided himself that he could directly and bravely look into the eyes of any man living; for, after all, does not dishonesty make the eyes shift and the heart cowardly?

He had trapped for fur-bearing animals on the North Shores; he had twice fought the rebels at the Red River; he had freighted many and many a “prairie schooner” from the Assiniboine to the Saskatchewan; and then, one glorious morning in July, when the hot yellow sun poured its wealth of heat and light into the velvety plains of Alberta, Maurice descried at the very edge of the western horizon a far-off speck of shining white, apparently not larger than a single lump of sugar.  As day followed day, and he traversed mile upon mile, more sugar lumps were visible; and, below their whiteness, the grayish distances grew into mountain shapes.  Then he realized that at last he beheld the inimitable glory of the Rockies that swept in snow-tipped grandeur from south to north.