mless
struggles and unregulated avarice, far from oppression and from misery,
far from bickerings, heart-burnings and envyings! Ah, John Law! Had God
but given thee the pure and well-contented heart! For here in the
Messasebe, that Mind which made the universe and set man to be one of
its little inhabitants--surely that Mind had planned that man should
come and grow in this place, tall and strong, and fruitful, useful to
all the world, even as this swift, strong growing of the maize.

CHAPTER VII

THE BRINK OF CHANGE

The breath of autumn came into the air. The little flowers which had
dotted the grassy robe of the rolling hills had long since faded away
under the ardent sun, and now there appeared only the denuded stalks of
the mulleins and the flaunting banners of the goldenrod. The wild grouse
shrank from the edges of the little fields and joined their numbers into
general bands, which night and morn crossed the country on sustained and
strong-winged flight. The plumage of the young wild turkeys, stalking in
droves among the open groves, began to emulate the iridescent splendors
of their elders. The marshes above the village became the home of yet
more numerous thousands of clamoring wild fowl, and high up against the
blue there passed, on the south-bound journey, the harrow of the wild
geese, wending their way from North to South across an unknown empire.

A chill came into the waters of the river, so that the bass and pike
sought out the deeper pools. The squirrels busily hoarded up supplies
of the nuts now ripening. The antlers of the deer and the elk which
emerged from the concealing thickets now showed no longer ragged strips
of velvet, and their tips were polished in the preliminary fitting for
the fall season of love and combat. There came nights when the white
frost hung heavy upon all the bending grasses and the broad-leafed
plants, a frost which seared the maize leaves and set aflame the foliage
of the maples all along the streams, and decked in a hundred flamboyant
tones the leaves of the sumach and all the climbing vines.

As all things now presaged the coming winter, so there approached also
the time when the little party, so long companions upon the Western
trails, must for the first time know division. Du Mesne, making ready
for the return trip over the unknown waterways back to the Lakes, as had
been determined to be necessary, spoke of it as though the journey were
but an affair of every