g him," he reflected. "If
Jean should catch me rousing Josephine or the baby he'd throttle me."

"Jean is--a sort of guardian," ventured Philip.

"More than that. Sometimes I think he is a spirit," said Adare
impressively. "I have known him for twenty years. Since the day
Josephine was born he has been her watch-dog. He came in the heart of a
great storm, years and years ago, nearly dead from cold and hunger. He
never went away, and he has talked but little about himself. See--"

Adare went to a shelf and returned with a bundle of manuscript.

"Jean gave me the idea for this," he went on.

There are two hundred and eighty pages here. I call it 'The Aristocracy
of the North.' It is true--and it is wonderful!

"You have seen a spring or New Year's gathering of the forest people at
a Company's post--the crowd of Indians, half-breeds, and whites who
follow the trap-lines? And would you guess that in that average
foregathering of the wilderness people there is better blood than you
could find in a crowded ballroom of New York's millionaires? It is
true. I have given fish to hungry half-breeds in whose veins flows the
blood of royalty. I have eaten with Indian women whose lineage reaches
back to names that were mighty before the first Astors and the first
Vanderbilts were born. The descendant of a king has hunted me caribou
meat at two cents a pound. In a smoke-blackened tepee, over beyond the
Gray Loon waterway, there lives a girl with hair and eyes as black as a
raven's wing who could go to Paris to-morrow and say: 'I am the
descendant of a queen,' and prove it. And so it is all over the
Northland.

"I have hunted down many curious facts, and I have them here in my
manuscript. The world cannot sneer at me, for records have been kept
almost since the day away back in the seventeenth century when Prince
Rupert landed with his first shipload of gentlemen adventurers. They
intermarried with our splendid Crees--those first wanderers from the
best families of Europe. They formed the English-Cree half-breed.
Prince Rupert himself had five children that can be traced to him. Le
Chevalier Grosselier had nine. And so it went on for a hundred years,
the best blood in England giving birth to a new race among the Crees,
and the best of France sowing new generations among the Chippewyans on
their way up from Quebec.

"And for another hundred years and more the English-Cree half-breed and
the French-Chippewyan half-breed have bee