nd apparent endlessness be the two main
qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin
are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call
this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing
agony.

The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with
normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years
there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered
every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with
remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which
would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly
of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have
succumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.

From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had
uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from
beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river,
reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by
miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its
surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange
they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.
Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing
faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were
mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The
faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to
the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having
dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to the
window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own,
yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him
in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the
reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a
child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger
on the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heard
it_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one,
beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone,
_and the woman_."

So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning
likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing
him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his
own voice, used as a medium for