ept by feeling and ravished by the desire for "the peace of the
Holy Grail." The village was, in truth, but a day's march away from him,
but he was not alone, and the journey could not be hastened. Beside him,
his eyes also upon the sunset and the village, was a man in a costume
half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy gray beard and massive frame, and a
distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose soul was tuned to past
suffering. As he sat, his head sunk on his breast, his elbow resting on a
stump of pine--the token of a progressive civilization--his chin upon his
hand, he looked like the figure of Moses made immortal by Michael Angelo.
But his strength was not like that of the man beside him, who was thirty
years younger. When he walked, it was as one who had no destination, who
had no haven toward which to travel, who journeyed as one to whom the
world is a wilderness, and one tent or one hut is the same as another, and
none is home.

Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles of
water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of miles
apart, whose courses are not the same, they two had met, the elder man,
sick and worn and near to death, in the poor hospitality of an Indian's
tepee. John Bickersteth had nursed the old man back to strength, and had
brought him southward with him--a silent companion, who spoke in
monosyllables, who had no conversation at all of the past and little of
the present, but who was a woodsman and an arctic traveller of the most
expert kind, who knew by instinct where the best places for shelter and
for sleeping might be found, who never complained, and was wonderful with
the dogs. Close as their association was, Bickersteth had felt concerning
the other that his real self was in some other sphere or place toward
which his mind was always turning, as though to bring it back.

Again and again had Bickersteth tried to get the old man to speak about
the past, but he had been met by a dumb sort of look, a straining to
understand. Once or twice the old man had taken his hands in both of his
own and gazed with painful eagerness into his face, as though trying to
remember or to comprehend something that eluded him. Upon these occasions
the old man's eyes dropped tears in an apathetic quiet, which tortured
Bickersteth beyond bearing. Just such a look he had seen in the eyes of a
favorite dog when he had performed an operation on it to save its life--a
rep