d yet will go on talking pertly about God in
nature, and of their ability to find themselves in him by studying him
in his works? God in nature, without Christ, is a riddle, a perplexity,
a mystery.

We pity poor Oowikapun. Just enough light had come to him to show him
that he was a poor, miserable sinner, but he had not yet received enough
to show him the true plan of salvation; and so he was still groping
along in the gloom, and much more to be pitied than the thousands who
know in theory what is God's plan of salvation, but who reject it
because of their pride or hardness of heart:

Everything seemed against him. His eyes were opened to see things now
as never before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after
peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed
mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he
had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart
just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be
destitute of the very things he had hoped she would have imparted to
him.

Sharp and rude was his first awakening from his illusion. He had not
gone far into the wilderness before it came to him, and it happened
thus. As he was walking along in the forest he heard, but a short
distance ahead of him, a pitiful cry of a creature in distress. Quickly
he hurried on, and was just in time to see the convulsive gasp of a
beautiful young fawn that had been seized and was being mangled by a
great, fierce wolf, which had found it where it had been hidden away by
the mother deer before she had gone into the beaver meadows to feed.

To send the death-dealing bullet through the brains of the savage wolf
was soon done, but, alas! it was too late to save the little innocent
fawn, whose great, big, beautiful eyes were already glassy in death, and
whose life-blood pouring out from the gaping wounds was crimsoning the
leaves and flowers where it had fallen.

"Is this," said Oowikapun, with sadness of spirit, "the first lesson
nature has for me? To her I am coming for peace and quietness of
spirit, and is this what I first see?" Thus on he travelled until he
reached the shores of a great lake, where he had resolved to stay for a
time, at the advice of Mookoomis, to try to find in the solitudes, in
communion with nature, that which his soul craved.

As an observant hunter he had ever been a student of nature, but never
before with s