tic pleasantries,--the loaded pung
slid forward from the light into the great, ghost-white gloom beyond.
The sled-bells jangled; the steel runners crunched and sang frostily;
and the cheerful camp, the only centre of human life within a radius
of more than twenty miles, sank back behind the voyagers. There was
the sound of a door slamming, and the bright streak across the snow
was blotted out. The travellers were alone on the trail, with the
solemn ranks of trees and the icy-pointed stars.

They were well prepared, these two happy Christmas adventurers, to
face the rigours of the December night. Under their heavy
blanket-coats were many thicknesses of homespun flannel. Inside their
high-laced, capacious "shoe-packs" were several pairs of yarn socks.
Their hands were covered by double-knit home-made mittens. Their
heads were protected by wadded caps of muskrat fur, with flaps that
pulled down well over the ears. The cold, which iced their eyelashes,
turned the tips of their up-turned coat-collars and the edges of their
mufflers to board, and made the old trees snap startlingly, had no
terrors at all for their hardy frames. Once well under way, and the
camp quite out of sight, they fell to chatting happily of the surprise
they would give the home folks, who did not expect them home for
Christmas. They calculated, if they had "anyways good luck," to get
home to the little isolated backwoods farmhouse between four and five
in the morning, about when grandfather would be getting up by
candle-light to start the kitchen fire for mother, and then go out and
fodder the cattle. They'd be home in time to wake the three younger
children (young Steve was the eldest of a family of four), and to add
certain little carven products of the woodsman's whittling--ingenious
wooden toys, and tiny elaborate boxes, filled with choicest globules
of spruce gum--to the few poor Christmas gifts which the resourceful
and busy little mother had managed to get together against the
festival. As they talked these things over, slowly and with frugal
speech, after the fashion of their class, suddenly was borne in upon
them a sense of the loneliness of the home folks' Christmas if they
should fail to come. Under the spell of this feeling, a kind of
inverted homesickness, their talk died into silence. They sat
thinking, and listening to the hoarse jangle of their bells.

In such a night as this, few of the wild kindreds were astir in the
forest. The bear