. Here
we saw two Italian section hands whiling away their Sunday with fishing
rods. I went ashore, hoping to buy some fish. Neither of the two could
speak English, and Italian sounds to me merely like an unintelligible
singing. However, they gave me to understand that the fish were not for
sale, and my proffered coin had no persuasive powers.

Still wanting those fish, I rolled a smoke, carelessly whistling the
while a strain from an opera I had once heard. For some reason or other
that strain had been in my head all day. I had gotten up in the morning
with it; I had whistled it during the fight with the head wind. The Kid
called it "that Dago tune." I think it was something from _Il
Trovatore_.

Suddenly one of the little Italians dropped his rod, stood up to his
full height, lifted his arms very much after the manner of an orchestra
leader and joined in with me. I stopped--because I saw that he _could_
whistle. He carried it on with much expression to the last thin note
with all the ache of the world in it. And then he grinned at me.

"Verdi!" he said sweetly.

I applauded. Whereat the little Italian produced a bag of tobacco. We
sat down on the rocks and smoked together, holding a wordless but
perfectly intelligble conversation of pleasant grins.

That night we had fish for supper! I got them for a song--or, rather,
for a whistle. I was fed with more than fish. And I went to sleep that
night with a glorious thought for a pillow: Truth expressed as Art is
the universal language. One immortal strain from Verdi, poorly whistled
in a wilderness, had made a Dago and a Dutchman brothers!

Scarcely had the crackling of the ruddy log lulled us to sleep, when the
night had flitted over like a shadow, and we were cooking breakfast. A
lone, gray wolf, sitting on his haunches a hundred paces away, regarded
us curiously. Doubtless we were new to his generation; for in the
evening dusk we had drifted well into the Bad Lands.

Bad Lands? Rather the Land of Awe!

A light stern wind came up with the sun. During the previous evening we
had rigged a cat-sail, and noiselessly we glided down the glinting trail
of crystal into the "Region of Weir."

On either hand the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow masses against
the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea,
carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented a panorama of
wonders.

Rows of huge colonial mansions with pillared porticoes looked fro