ssary
arrangements.

For Peter Boots these arrangements consisted merely in getting two
congenial companions, and to them he left all minor details of
paraphernalia and equipment. Not that Peter was lazy or inclined to
shift his burdens to others' shoulders, but he was so engrossed with the
itinerary and calculations of distance, climate and season that he had
no time to engage guides or buy camp outfits.

But the two men he picked,--and who jumped at the chance,--were more
than willing and perfectly capable of all this, and so all details of
the expedition were carefully looked after.

There had been opposition, of course. Peter's parents were emphatically
unwilling to let their only son run dangers, all the more fearsome
because only vaguely apprehended.

But their big boy smiled genially at them and went on with his
calculations.

His sister, too, pretty Julie, besought him not to go. "You'll get lost
in the ice," she wailed, "and never come back to me--and Carly."

Now Carly,--otherwise Miss Carlotta Harper--was a disturbing element in
the even tenor of Peter's life, and of late her disturbance had attained
such importance that tucked away in a corner of his big, happy heart was
a cozy, cuddly little notion that when he came back from Labrador he
would take her to embark with him on a certain Great Adventure.

Perhaps her womanly intuition sensed danger, for Carly joined with
Peter's sister in her entreaties that he spend his vacation nearer home.

"But I don't want to," stated Peter, with the air of one giving a full
explanation.

"That settles it," sighed Julie; "what Peter Boots wants is law in this
house."

"Autocrat! Tyrant! Oppressor!" and Carlotta wrinkled her little nose in
an effort to express scornful disdain.

"Yes," Peter agreed, with his benignant smile, "despot, demagogue,
dictator, oligarch, lord of the roost and cock of the walk! It's a great
thing to be monarch of all one surveys!"

"To the surveyor," flouted Carlotta, "but if you knew what the surveyed
think of you!"

"I'd be all puffed up with pride and vanity, I suppose," Peter nodded
his still golden head, though Time's caressing fingers had burnished the
yellow to a deeper bronze.

"You'll break mother's heart," suggested Julie, but in a hopelessly
resigned tone.

"Only the same old break, sister, and it's been cracked and mended so
many times, I'm sure it'll stand another smash."

"Oh, he's going, and that's all there is