, and--ah, well!"

Mitchell's expression was still quaintly humorous round the lower part
of his face, but there was a sad light in his eyes. The strange light as
of the old dead days, and he was still young.

The cornet had started in the surveyors' camp.

"Their blooming tunes seem to fit in just as if they knew what we were
talking about," remarked Mitchell.

The cornet:

You'll break my heart, you little bird,
That sings upon the flowering thorn
Thou mind'st me of departed joys,
Departed never to return.

"Damn it all," said Mitchell, sitting up, "I'm getting sentimental."
Then, as if voicing something that was troubling him, "Don't you think a
woman pulls a man down as often as she lifts him up, Peter?"

"Some say so," said Peter.

"Some say so, and they write it, too," said Mitchell.

"Sometimes it seems to me as if women were fated to drag a man down ever
since Adam's time. If Adam hadn't taken his wife's advice--but there,
perhaps he took her advice a good many times and found it good, and,
just because she happened to be wrong this time, and to get him into a
hole, the sons of Adam have never let the daughters of Eve hear the last
of it. That's human nature."

Jack Barnes, the young husband, who was suffering a recovery, had been
very silent all the evening. "I think a man's a fool to always listen to
his wife's advice," he said, with the unreasonable impatience of a man
who wants to think while others are talking. "She only messes him up,
and drives him to the devil as likely as not, and gets a contempt for
him in the end."

Peter gave him a surprised, reproachful look, and stood up. He paced
backwards and forwards on the other side of the fire, with his hands
behind his back for a while; then he came and settled himself on the log
again and filled his pipe.

"Yes," he said, "a man can always find excuses for himself when his
conscience stings him. He puts mud on the sting. Man at large is
beginning all over the world to rake up excuses for himself; he
disguises them as `Psychological studies,' and thinks he is clean and
clever and cultured, or he calls 'em problems--the sex problem, for
instance, and thinks he is brave and fearless."

Danny was in trouble again, and Peter went to him. He complained that
when he lay down he saw the faces worse, and he wanted to be propped up
somehow, so Peter got a pack-saddle and propped the old man's shoulders
up with that.

"I remember,"