this point, and
when at last the two bade their primitive friends good-bye and left for
home, the little Indian children and the women followed their canoe
along the edge of a stream and flung handfuls of flowers after them.

Of what Meleese Cummins and her husband know of the great outside
world, or of what they do not know, it is wisest to leave unsaid.
Details have often marred a picture. They are children of the
wilderness, born of that wilderness, bred of it, and life of it--a
beating and palpitating part of a world which few can understand. I
doubt if one or the other has ever heard of a William Shakespeare or a
Tennyson, for it has not been in my mind or desire to ask; but they do
know the human heart as it beats and throbs in a land that is
desolation and loneliness, where poetry runs not in lines and meters,
but in the bloom of the wild flower, the rush of the rapid, the thunder
of the waterfall and the murmuring of the wind in the spruce tops;
where drama exists not in the epic lines of literature, but in the hunt
cry of the wolf, the death dirges of the storms that wail down from the
Barrens, and in the strange cries that rise up out of the silent
forests, where for a half of each year life is that endless strife that
leaves behind only those whom we term the survival of the fittest.

THE CASE OF BEAUVAIS

Madness? Perhaps. And yet if it was madness. . . .

But strange things happen up there, gentlemen. I have found it
sometimes hard to define that word. There are so many kinds of madness,
so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it
happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is
so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men
of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far,
something breaks and we go insane.

But I will tell you the story. That is what you want to hear, and you
expect that it will be prejudiced--that I will either deliberately
attempt to protect and prolong a human life, or shorten and destroy it.
I shall do neither, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police. I have a
faith in you that is in its way an unbounded as my faith in God. I have
looked up to you in all my life in the wilderness as the heart of
chivalry and the soul of honor and fairness to all men. Pathfinders,
men of iron, guardians of people and spaces of which civilization knows
but little, I have taught my children of the forests t