eek. He turned abruptly; the barometer
slipped out of his numb fingers. He made a lunge to recover it,
clutched the air, and, sliding suddenly forward, over he went, flying
headlong down the steep escarpment.

He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer
face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck
a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed
alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held
there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and
river.

His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes
as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling,
clutching at the air--falling--and felt the alder twigs snap under his
hands, he said to himself, "This is death," but calmly, as if it were a
small matter compared to losing one's snow-shoes.

It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of
the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end. It was
then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle
frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin
ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or
seventy feet below. He lay quite still. Would the Colonel come after
him? If he did come, would he risk his life to----If he did risk his
life, was it any use to try to----He craned his neck and looked up,
blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of
far-off singing in his head. "Any use?" No, sir; it just about wasn't.
That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and
either was impossible.

Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him--a flood of
passionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life. All the
bitter hardship--why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to
overcome! It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil. The
endless Trail? Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man
minded.

Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out. Nothing in
all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.
And he had only just been wakened to it. Here, now, lying in his grave,
had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the
splendour of the visible universe.

The sky over his head--he had called it "a mean outlook," and turned
away. It was the same sky that bent