en half
a chance."

"I don't call it going back," was the quiet reply. "I feel as if I had
merely dropped a large number of utterly useless hamperings. Life has
never seemed so free and completely desirable before, and yet, when we
have been running some of the most terrifying rapids, I have felt that I
could give it up without a murmur if I shouldn't prove big enough to
keep it in spite of the hazards. At such times I have felt that I could
go out with only one big regret--the thought that I wasn't going to live
long enough to find out _why_ I had to be drowned in the heart of a
Canadian forest."

VIII

CRACKING VENEERS

AT the foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them the
two voyagers found the course of their river changing again to the
southeastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to the
changing course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while the
rapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least they
looked so.

By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles,
together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In the
quick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregard
the wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As the
comradeship ripened, their attitude toward each other grew more and more
intolerant of the civilized reservations.

Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing
artificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of the
veneers.

"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities
before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which
they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the
vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously
trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that
civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that,
given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our
civilized clothes are doing right now."

The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying
to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from
one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out
of a fish-bone.

"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the
dee