ly masculine voice in the rear--a voice that
might come from a steel girder--whereupon the rest of us discreetly
retire to allow for the arrangement of preliminaries. Love is born
through effrontery more often than we think.

When we have achieved the sights of Jasper we entrain for Tete Jaune
Cache, a beautiful moping place on the Fraser River. All the way along
we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and
mystery, and perhaps of fear. Here our eyes are pleasured with an
illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form
cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which
the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green
where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river
with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a
glacier--a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun.

The artists with us talk of values, vistas, truth of space,
chiaroscuro, mellowness of effect, and transparence of air. Perhaps
they are right, but it seems to me that when Nature stretched her stone
canvas in the Rockies she did not trouble with the trivialities of
pleasing prettiness or technical nicety. She brushed in her colours
with a boldness of mass and outline, with an energy and expression that
stagger. There is no ambiguity about them. She used primary colours
and never hesitated. Royal purple, the orange light of fire, and the
sickening red in which Tintoretto has painted the wounds of his
martyrs, she here emphasized by the "cold virgin snow" on the peaks.

For uncounted centuries, silence has brooded over the beauty of these
imperturbable hills and over their unpathed, desolate places which only
the eyes of the gods have seen. It is well with me this day that I
journey through them, for here, as in Eden, the terrestrial and
celestial may be one. It is well, too, that in passing I may shut my
eyes and mentally sing the song of the land as it came hot from the
heart of a poet in his home at the foot of these hills--

"Oh, could ye see, and could ye see
The great gold skies so clear,
The rivers that race the pine shade dark,
The mountainous snows that take no mark,
Sunlit and high on the Rockies stark
So far they seem as near.

But could ye know, and forever know
The word of the young Northwest;
A word she breathes to the true and bold,
A word misknown to the false and cold,