y Isabel was asleep and I sat alone beside the
hearth, another and widely different magic came from those embers. Their
tongues of flame, subtly interfused with smoke, called back to memory
the many camp-fires I had builded beside the streams, beneath the pines
of the mountain west.

Each of my tenting places drew near. At one moment, far in the Skeena
Valley, I sat watching the brave fire beat back the darkness and the
rain--hearing a glacial river roaring from the night. At another I was
encamped in the shelter of a mighty cliff, listening in awe while along
its lofty shelves the lions prowled and in the cedars, amid the ruins of
prehistoric cities, the wind chanted a solemn rune filled with the
voices of those whose bones had long since been mingled with the dust.

Oh, the good days on the trail!
I cannot lose you--I will not!
Here in the amber of my song
I hold you.
Here where neither time nor change
Can do you wrong.
I sweep you together,
The harvest of a continent. The gold
Of a thousand days of quest.
So, when I am old,
Like a chained eagle I can sit
And dream and dream
Of splendid spaces,
The gleam of rivers,
And the smell of prairie flowers.
So, when I have quite forgot
The heritage of books, I still shall know
The splendor of the mountains, and the glow
Of sunset on the vanished plain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Fairy World of Childhood

One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my
father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all
came,--Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who
meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing
hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic
associations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath
its magic light.

Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good
as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the
practical, they each and all passed to minute and loving descriptions of
just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in
Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven,
Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk
a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and
yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but
e