dness to all mankind. He found it possible, indeed,
to think of Crawley, even, with a benignant compassion.

Far up in the Pass they camped, in a little sheltered dell all thick
with jack pines, through whose wide-spreading roots ran and chattered a
little mountain brook. But for the anxiety that lay like lead upon her
heart, how delightful to Marion would have been this, her first,
experience of a night out of doors. And when after tea Shock, sitting
close by the fire, read that evening Psalm, breathing a trust and peace
that no circumstances of ill could break, the spicy air and the deep
blue sky overhead, sown with stars that rained down their gentle beams
through the silent night, made for Marion a holy place where God seemed
near, and where it was good to lie down and rest. "I will both lay me
down in peace and sleep, for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in
safety."

And that sense of security, of being under tender, loving care, did not
forsake her all through the long watches of the night, and through the
weary miles of the next day's travel that brought them at length to the
Old Prospector's camp.

As they neared the camp the trail emerged out of thick bushes into a
wide valley, where great pines stood, with wide spaces between, and
clear of all underbrush. The whole valley was carpeted thick with pine
needles, and gleamed like gold in the yellow light of the evening sun.
The lower boughs under which they rode were dead, and hung with long
streamers of grey moss that gave the trees the appearance of hoary age.

As they entered the valley instinctively they lowered their voices and
spoke in reverent tones, as if they had been ushered into an assemblage
of ancient and silent sages. On every side the stately pines led away
in long vistas that suggested the aisles of some noble cathedral. There
was no sign of life anywhere, no motion of leaf or bough, no sound to
break the solemn stillness. The clatter of a hoof over a stone broke on
the ear with startling discordance. The wide reaches of yellow carpet
of pine needles, golden and with black bars of shadow, the long drawn
aisles of tall pines, bearing aloft like stately pillars the high,
arched roof of green, the lower limbs sticking out from the trunks bony
and bare but for the pendant streamers of grey moss, all bathed in the
diffused radiance of the yellow afternoon light, suggested some weird
and mighty fane of a people long dead, whose spirits, haunting these