e a magic
brush that paints a picture of black rocks and dark water, and my first
trout taken on a cast. For a hundred years, if I live that long, this
crumpled book and these broken, worn-out flies will bring back the
clear, wild water and the green shores of a Nova Scotia June, the
remoter silences of the deeper forest, the bright camps by twisting
pools and tumbling falls, the flash of the leaping trout, the feel of
the curved rod and the music of the singing reel.

I shall always recall Eddie, then, and I shall bless him for many
things--and forgive him for others. I shall remember Del, too, the
Stout, and Charles the Strong, and that they made my camping worth
while. I was a trial to them, and they were patient--almost unreasonably
so. I am even sorry now for the time that my gun went off and scared
Del, though it seemed amusing at the moment. When the wind beats up and
down the park, and the trees are bending and cracking with ice; when I
know that once more the still places of the North are white and the
waters fettered--I shall shut my eyes and see again the ripple and the
toss of June, and hear once more the under voices of the falls. And some
day I shall return to those far shores, for it is a place to find one's
soul.

Yet perhaps I should not leave that statement unqualified, for it
depends upon the sort of a soul that is to be found. The north wood does
not offer welcome or respond readily to the lover of conventional luxury
and the smaller comforts of living. Luxury is there, surely, but it is
the luxury that rewards effort, and privation, and toil. It is the
comfort of food and warmth and dry clothes after a day of endurance--a
day of wet, and dragging weariness, and bitter chill. It is the bliss of
reaching, after long, toilsome travel, a place where you can meet the
trout--the splendid, full-grown wild trout, in his native home, knowing
that you will not find a picnic party on every brook and a fisherman
behind every tree. Finally, it is the preciousness of isolation, the
remoteness from men who dig up and tear down and destroy, who set
whistles to tooting and bells to jingling--who shriek themselves hoarse
in the market place and make the world ugly and discordant, and life a
short and fevered span in which the soul has a chance to become no more
than a feeble and crumpled thing. And if that kind of a soul pleases
you, don't go to the woods. It will be only a place of mosquitoes, and
general wetness,