the botanist, the country is a treasure house. Almost, if not all, of the flora indigenous to the temperate zone, is found within its borders.
The flowers have a kingdom in the dunes. From the secluded nooks and fertile crevices, from among the shadows of the trees, and along the margins of the marshes and little pools, their silent songs of color go out over the landscapes. In no form is beauty so completely expressed, and in no form is it so accessible to us.
The sketches in this volume are culled from the experiences and reflections of many happy days that were spent in this mystic land. In such a retreat we may find refuge from the town, from the nerve-racking noise and stifling smoke, and from the artificialities and the social illusions that becloud our daily lives.
E. H. R.
ILLUSTRATIONS
| The “Ancient” | Frontispiece | |
| Mt. Tom | Facing page | 24 |
| The Heron’s Pool | 40 | |
| “Omemee” | 50 | |
| The Moon in the Marsh | 66 | |
| “Holy Zeke” | 74 | |
| Mrs. Elvirey Smetters | 106 | |
| Bill Saunders | 134 | |
| The “Bogie House” | 150 | |
| “Na’cissus Jackson” | 164 | |
| The Requiem of the Leaves | 204 | |
| The Game Warden and his Deputy | 222 | |
| On the White Hills | 236 | |
| The Troopers of the Sky | 270 |
I
THE DREAM JEWEL
I
THE DREAM JEWEL
The tribe of the sturgeon was speeding southward over the rock-strewn floors of the inland sea. In the van of the swimming host its leader bore a wondrous stone. From it multicolored beams flashed out through the dim waters and into unsounded depths. Shapes, still and ghostly, with waving fins and solemn orbs, stared at the passing glow and vanished. Phantom-like forms faded quickly into dark recesses, and frightened schools of small fish fled away over pale sandy expanses. Clouds of fluttering gulls and terns followed the strange light that gleamed below the waves. Migrating birds, high in the night skies, wheeled with plaintive calls, for this new radiance was not of the world of wings and fins.
The wonder stone was being carried out of the Northland. For ages untold it had reposed in the heart of a stupendous glacier, that crept over the region of the great lakes from the roof of the world—from that vast frozen sea of desolation that is ghastly white and endless—under the corona of the Northern Lights.
From a cavern deep in ice, its prismatic rays had illumined the crystal labyrinths during the slow progress of the monster of the north, grinding and scarring the earth in its path of devastation.
The radiance from the stone was ineffable. Such color may have swept into the heavens on the world’s first morning, when the Spirit moved over the face of the waters, or have trembled in the halo at the Creation, when cosmos was evolved out of elemental fires.
It glowed in the awful stillness of its prison, untouched by the primeval storms that raged before the mammoths trod the earth, and before men of the stone age had learned the use of fire.
Many centuries after the greater part of the gigantic ice sheet had yielded to balmy airs, its frowning ramparts lingered along the wild shores of the north. The white silence was broken by reverberations from crumbling masses that crashed down the steeps into the billows that broke against the barrier. In one of the pieces the stone was borne away. The luminous lump drifted with the winds. It was nuzzled by curious rovers of the blue waters that rubbed gently along its sides and basked in the refulgence. With the final dissolution of the fragment, the stone was released.
In quest of new feeding grounds, the sturgeon had explored these frigid depths, and, after privation and fruitless wanderings, had gathered for the long retreat to a warmer clime. Their leader beheld the blazing gem falling, like a meteor, before him. With fateful instinct he seized it and moved grimly on. The gray horde saw the light from afar and streamed after it, as warriors might have followed the banner of a hero.
Through many miles of dark solitudes the bearer of the stone led his adventurous array. Swiftly moving fins took the sturgeon to waters where nature had been more merciful.
The roaring surf lines of the southern shore washed vast flat stretches of sand that were bleak and sterile, for no living green relieved the monotonous wilds.
A few Indians had been driven by warfare into this dreary land. Their wigwams were scattered along the coast, where they eked out a precarious existence from the spoil of the waters.
When the sturgeon came their lives were quickened with new energy. With their bark canoes and stone spears they found many victims among the tired fish. A wrinkled prophet, who had communed with the gods of his people, in a dream, had foretold the sending of a luminous stone, by a sturgeon, that would mark the beginning of an era of prosperity and happiness for his tribe.
