ting Albany friends. You spoke about the canals, and
the other members stopped gossiping and writing letters to listen."

"The canal is a part of my religion," Shelby answered.

They crossed the ancient shore line of the lake, the Ridge,
so-called,--successive highway of the Iroquois, the pioneer, the
stage-coach, and the ubiquitous trolley,--and caught presently the
distant shimmer of Ontario, sail-dotted, intensely blue. That first
glimpse of the inland sea always stirred Ruth to the depths. It was
not the romance of New France alone which it evoked--that picturesque
procession of redmen, _coureurs de bois_, friars, Jesuits, soldiers of
fortune, La Salle, Frontenac, the conquering English, the
conqueror-conquering American--but the mystery of the vaster tidal sea
toward which it drew, whose supremest witchery none may know save the
yearning inland-born.

"Calm as a puddle to-day," said Joe. "You can almost hear the Canucks
singing 'God Save the Queen.'"

Dusk had set in when they left the deserted piazzas of the summer hotel
for the camp-meeting in the grove. The flare of torches wavered afar
between the tree boles, and above the lapping of the waves walled a
drear hymn.

Mrs. Hilliard skipped girlishly in the woodland path.

"They've begun, they've begun," she exulted. "We shall see the fun
after all."

"It's too early for the meeting in the big tent," Shelby told Ruth;
"but if you've never seen anything of the kind, the scene which goes
before will be quite as curious."

Skirting a makeshift village of tiny tents and shanties they issued to
a torch-lit clearing in the wood whose central object was the greater
tent, which, frayed, weathered, and patched as it was, yet stood to
these zealots of an iron creed as the chosen tabernacle of a very God.
Its rough benches were empty now, but before its dingy portal swayed
and groaned a rapt circle of men and women, hand in hand, in whose
midst an old man with a prophet's head and a bigot's eye was gyrating
like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified.
As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle
of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped
exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike
at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with russet leaves.

Ruth recoiled with a shudder. The swaying circle redoubled its
incantations, and left him to his envied beatitude