and as you still his song you
recall a recent statement by the scientist Klein, that an insect's wings
flap four hundred times in a second. The mind does not readily grasp so
rapid a motion, but you accept the figures on trust, as you accept the
distances of interstellar spaces.

Very soon you discover that you were in error about the fewness of the
flies. They are all there--mosquitoes, black-flies, deer-flies, and
punkies, besides other species strictly vegetarian. So you drop the
tent-bag and build a smudge. Experience has taught you to make a small
but hot fire, and when this is well under way you kick open a rotted,
moss-grown cedar and scoop up handfuls of damp mould. This, piled on and
banked around the fire, provides a smudge that is continuous and
effective. We built smudges morning, noon, and night. Whenever a halt
was called, if only for five minutes, I reached mechanically for a strip
of birchbark and a handful of twigs. At one camping place the ring of
smudges suggested the magic fire circle in "Die Walkuere." Brunhilde lay
in her tent, in a reek of smoke, while Wotan, in no humor for song,
heaped vegetable tinder upon the defending fires. More than once the
darkening forest and the steel-gray sky of a Canadian twilight have set
me humming the motives of "The Ring," and I shall always remember a
pretty picture in an earlier cruise. "Jess" was a stable boy who drove
our team to the point where roads ceased, and during a halt in the
expedition this exuberant youth reclined upon a log, and with a pipe
fashioned from a reed sought to imitate responsively the song of the
white-throated sparrow. He looked for all the world like Siegfried in
his forest.

"Smudge." It is not a poetic word--mere mention of it would distress Mr.
Yeats; but it is potent as "Sesame" to unlock the treasures of memory.
And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for
a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the
heart of the enchanted wood.

IV.--"BOGWAH."

We have been paddling for more than an hour, through dark and slowly
moving water. Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view
ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land,
and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a
stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we
make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging
picture