made the tiny
flakes sparkle like silver--a _poudre_ day, when the face and hands are
most like to be frozen, and all so still and white and passionless, yet
aching with energy. Hundreds upon hundreds of miles that endless trail
went winding to the farthest Northwest. No human being had ever trod its
lengths before, though Indians or a stray Hudson's Bay Company man had
made journeys over part of it during the years that have passed since
Prince Rupert sent his adventurers to dot that northern land with posts
and forts and trace fine arteries of civilization through the wastes.

Where this man had gone none other had been of white men from the western
lands, though from across the wide Pacific, from the Eastern world,
adventurers and exiles had once visited what is now known as the Yukon
Valley. So this man, browsing in the library of his grandfather, an
Eastern scholar, had come to know; and for love of adventure, and because
of the tale of a valley of gold and treasure to be had, and because he had
been ruined by bad investments, he had made a journey like none ever
essayed before. And on his way up to those regions, where the veil before
the face of God is very thin and fine, and men's hearts glow within them,
where there was no oasis save the unguessed deposit of a great human dream
that his soul could feel, the face of a girl had haunted him. Her
voice--so sweet a voice that it rang like muffled silver in his ears,
till, in the everlasting theatre of the pole, the stars seemed to repeat
it through millions of echoing hills, growing softer and softer as the
frost hushed it to his ears--had said to him late and early, "You must
come back with the swallows." Then she had sung a song which had been like
a fire in his heart, not alone because of the words of it, but because of
the soul in her voice, and it had lain like a coverlet on his heart to
keep it warm:

"Adieu! The sun goes awearily down,
The mist creeps up o'er the sleepy town,
The white sail bends to the shuddering mere,
And the reapers have reaped and the night is here.

"Adieu! And the years are a broken song,
The right grows weak in the strife with wrong,
The lilies of love have a crimson stain,
And the old days never will come again.

"Adieu! Where the mountains afar are dim
'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim,
Shall not our