,
and the canoe itself turned bottom up. Then, at carryin' places, I can
carry Little Bill as well as other things. He's not heavy and doesn't
struggle, so we won't leave him to stagger and fall. As to frost--have
we not hatchets, and are there not dead trees in the forest? Frost and
fire never walk in company, so that Little Bill won't get cold and die,
for we'll keep him warm--waugh!"

When human beings are fond of each other disagreement seldom lasts long.
Okematan had taken so strong a fancy to Archie that he felt it
impossible to hold out; therefore, being a man of strong common sense,
he did not attempt the impossible.

Thus it came to pass that, two days later, a couple of birch-bark canoes
were launched on the waters of Red River, with Dan Davidson in the stern
of one and Fergus McKay acting as his bowman. Okematan took the stern
of the other, while Archie Sinclair wielded the bow-paddle, and Little
Bill was placed in the middle on a comfortable green blanket with the
celebrated "bum-rella" erected over him to keep off, not the rain, but,
the too glorious sunshine.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

AN AUSPICIOUS BEGINNING AND SUSPICIOUS ENDING.

Let loose in the wilderness! How romantic, how inexpressibly
delightful, that idea seems to some minds! Ay, even when the weight of
years begins to stiffen the joints and slack the cords of life the
memory of God's great, wild, untrammelled, beautiful wilderness comes
over the spirit like a refreshing dream and restores for a time
something like the pulse of youth.

We sometimes think what a joy it would be if youth could pass through
its blessings with the intelligent experience of age. And it may be
that this is to be one of the joys of the future, when man, redeemed and
delivered from sin by Jesus Christ, shall find that the memory of the
sorrows, sufferings, weaknesses of the past shall add inconceivably to
the joys of the present. It may be so. Judging from analogy it does
not seem presumptuous to suppose and hope that it will be so.

"Sufficient unto the day," however, is the joy thereof.

When the two canoes pushed off and swept rapidly over the fair bosom of
Red River, the heart of Archie Sinclair bounded with a feeling of
exultant joy which it would have been very hard indeed to convince him
was capable of increase, while the bosom of his invalid brother was
filled with a sort of calm serenity which constituted, in his opinion at
the time being, a qu