AMILTON
W. MABIE: Under the Trees.

There is magic in words, surely, and many a treasure besides Ali Baba's
is unlocked with a verbal key. Some charm in the mere sound, some
association with the pleasant past, touches a secret spring. The bars
are down; the gate open; you are made free of all the fields of memory
and fancy--by a word.

Au large! Envoyez au large! is the cry of the Canadian voyageurs as they
thrust their paddles against the shore and push out on the broad lake
for a journey through the wilderness. Au large! is what the man in the
bow shouts to the man in the stern when the birch canoe is running down
the rapids, and the water grows too broken, and the rocks too thick,
along the river-bank. Then the frail bark must be driven out into
the very centre of the wild current, into the midst of danger to find
safety, dashing, like a frightened colt, along the smooth, sloping lane
bordered by white fences of foam.

Au large! When I hear that word, I hear also the crisp waves breaking on
pebbly beaches, and the big wind rushing through innumerable trees, and
the roar of headlong rivers leaping down the rocks, I see long reaches
of water sparkling in the sun, or sleeping still between evergreen walls
beneath a cloudy sky; and the gleam of white tents on the shore; and
the glow of firelight dancing through the woods. I smell the delicate
vanishing perfume of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of
birch-bark, crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing
odour of balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds--the veritable and
only genuine perfume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil of the
Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky; at
the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain rises.
Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a party of hunters.

It was in the Lake St. John country, two hundred miles north of Quebec,
that I first heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to fit the
region as if it had been made for it. This is not a little pocket
wilderness like the Adirondacks, but something vast and primitive. You
do not cross it, from one railroad to another, by a line of hotels. You
go into it by one river as far as you like, or dare; and then you turn
and come back again by another river, making haste to get out before
your provisions are exhausted. The lake itself is the cradle of the
mighty Saguenay: an inland sea, thirty miles across and nearly roun