d, nay," said Granny, "not to such loving hearts as yours."

FOOTNOTE:

[Y] From "Christmastide," published by the Chicago Kindergarten College,
copyright, 1902.

XXXIV

CHRISTMAS ON BIG RATTLE[Z]

THEODORE GOODRIDGE ROBERTS

ARCHER sat by the rude hearth of his Big Rattle camp, brooding in a sort
of tired contentment over the spitting fagots of _var_ and glowing coals
of birch.

It was Christmas Eve. He had been out on his snowshoes all that day, and
all the day before, springing his traps along the streams and putting
his deadfalls out of commission--rather queer work for a trapper to be
about.

But Archer, despite all his gloomy manner, was really a sentimentalist,
who practised what he felt.

"Christmas is a season of peace on earth," he had told himself, while
demolishing the logs of a sinister deadfall with his axe; and now the
remembrance of his quixotic deed added a brightness to the fire and to
the rough, undecorated walls of the camp.

Outside, the wind ran high in the forest, breaking and sweeping tidelike
over the reefs of treetops.

The air was bitterly cold. Another voice, almost as fitful as the sough
of the wind, sounded across the night. It was the waters of Stone Arrow
Falls, above Big Rattle.

The frosts had drawn their bonds of ice and blankets of silencing snow
over all the rest of the stream, but the white and black face of the
falls still flashed from a window in the great house of crystal, and
threw out a voice of desolation.

Sacobie Bear, a full-blooded Micmac, uttered a grunt of relief when his
ears caught the bellow of Stone Arrow Falls. He stood still, and turned
his head from side to side, questioningly.

"Good!" he said. "Big Rattle off there, Archer's camp over there. I go
there. Good 'nough!"

He hitched his old smooth-bore rifle higher under his arm and continued
his journey. Sacobie had tramped many miles--all the way from
ice-imprisoned Fox Harbor. His papoose was sick. His squaw was hungry.
Sacobie's belt was drawn tight.

During all that weary journey his old rifle had not banged once,
although few eyes save those of timber-wolf and lynx were sharper in the
hunt than Sacobie's. The Indian was reeling with hunger and weakness,
but he held bravely on.

A white man, no matter how courageous and sinewy, would have been prone
in the snow by that time.

But Sacobie, with his head down and his round snowshoes _padding!
padding!_ like the feet of a frighten