"people" from the
days of girlhood; it will not forget the thousand perils she faced to
seek out the sick, the plague-stricken and the starving; in old age
there will still be those who will remember the first prayers to the
real God that she taught them in childhood; and children still to come,
in cabin, tepee and hut, will live to bless the memory of L'ange
Meleese, who made possible for them a new birthright and who in the
wild places lived to the full measure and glory of the Golden Rule.

To find Meleese Cummins and her home in the wilderness, one must start
at Le Pas as the last outpost of civilization and strike northward
through the long Pelican Lake waterways to Reindeer Lake. Nearly forty
miles up the east shore of the lake, the adventurer will come to the
mouth of the Gray Loon--narrow and silent stream that winds under
overhanging forests--and after that a two-hours' journey in a canoe
will bring one to the Cummins' cabin.

It is set in a clearing, with the thick spruce and balsam and cedar
hemming it in, and a tall ridge capped with golden birch rising behind
it. In that clearing John Cummins raises a little fruit and a few
vegetables during the summer months; but it is chiefly given up to
three or four huge plots of scarlet moose-flowers, a garden of Labrador
tea, and wild flowering plants and vines of half a dozen varieties. And
where the radiant moose-flowers grow thickest, screened from the view
of the cabin by a few cedars and balsams, are the rough wooden slabs
that mark seven graves. Six of them are the graves of children--little
ones who died deep in the wilderness and whose tiny bodies Meleese
Cummins could not leave to the savage and pitiless loneliness of the
forests, but whom she has brought together that they might have company
in what she calls her, "Little Garden of God."

Those little graves tell the story of Meleese--the woman who, all heart
and soul, has buried her own one little babe in that garden of flowers.
One of the slabs marks the grave of an Indian baby, whose little dead
body Meleese Cummins carried to her cabin in her own strong arms from
twenty miles back in the forest, when the temperature was fifty degrees
below zero. Another of them, a baby boy, a French half-breed and his
wife brought down from fifty miles up the Reindeer and begged "L'ange
Meleese" to let it rest with the others, where "it might not be lonely
and would not be frightened by the howl of the wolves." It was