sined 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