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"How" began Harry and stopped, Why, things seem to be coming our way uncertain what he should say.

all the time. But I feel as if I wanted to "How'd I know?" said McGinnis. tell them all-I have told a good many, "Well, fact is, Harry, I met Meecham, that I'm one of your converts, a brand and I bought that note." snatched from the burning, as it were. I "It's endorsed by me," said Harry, was switching off on the other tack when huskily; "I'll pay you, Mac." you set me thinking-that evening at the club, you remember-about old Fanning. I began to look things up, and I was appalled, simply appalled at what I found out."

Naw, you won't.

He

Jay Sibley will pay that note. He'll pay every last cent. Not jest this minnit, but as the money comes in. I'll handle that young man without gloves for his soul's good. ain't my brother-in-law ! Don't you lose a mite of sleep, Harry. I'll fix him and there won't be no scandal or bad times. It'll all come right in the wash. You just say you've seen me, or, better still, you don't say nothing at all. I'll write him; and when he comes up here, you'll see a very much reformed and penitent young man. Here's your street-car, Harry-that's all right."

He had pushed Harry and his broken thanks onto the platform as he spoke.

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A month later Leroy met Darcy, both being on their wheels. "Well, Darcy, how goes it?" called Harry, with a cordiality that he had not felt for years; "I hear you are doing grand work."

Darcy's wheel was shining and beautiful; Harry's was a second-hand rattling machine of a make unknown to fame; but probably not a man in town had had more pleasure in riding than he. He looked tanned and happy.

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Yes, when I came to look things up, I found there was only one ground for me to take, and I took it. I want to be right, and this talk of consistency doesn't cut any ice with me. I hope you get the Hammer all right. Say, I hear you're doing a lot of work right along."

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The best thing I ever did was to convert you," said Harry, laughing; "I never could quite take that story into camp until now, and felt I was getting credit under false colors; but now I shall 'point with pride'- Well, good luck to you, and let me know if I can help you any time."

As he rode along, he thought, half wistfully, but without a grain of envy, “I wish I had that man's talent!"

Darcy smiled to himself, watching him. "He's dead easy," he muttered; then all of a sudden, with the swift transitions of his temperament, he bit down a sigh.

"D it!" he almost groaned, "I "That you, Harry? how well you ride! wish I had that man's conscience!"

AT A WINDOW

By Gertrude Hall

OUR earth, with its proud mountains draped
In snow we call eternal, and the times thereof
Are unto God as in the sea one tear.
The things that shall not be escaped,
Is not it, pensive love,

As if already they were here?

Already, each in his sealed hermitage,

We lie that yet were social !-grass above;
The story of our lives, so full of things!
Abridged to fit one marble page;
And yearly twice a kindly person brings
Brave wreaths for us, in pious pilgrimage.

Already what was flesh of ours has climbed to light
In daisies that with round, gold eyes

Stare at our houses' sign, no longer white;
They could not read it were they human-wise,
So are the letters filled with moss,

So have the summer creatures woven webs across.

Already we are trampled to the plain,

A wind-swept, silent desert-then, again,

The air is shivered with the shouts of men,

Ploughs scatter us, wheels grind us farther down,
Above us grows the town.

Dear heart, these gauds of life, are they so dear,
To us, dear heart, to us-already dead?

The curious jewel for the ear,

The flashing fillet for the head ?

And, treasures that all in their kind excel,

This fair, well-painted fan, this scarf, so well embroidered? Nay, love, but the great house itself, builded so well,

That shows in every part a master's touch,'

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MINGAN SEIGNIORY

BY FREDERIC IRLAND:

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N whatever murky American city one's lot may be cast, the earthly paradise of a perfect summer day is never very far off, as the wild duck flies. When the walls and pavements of New York are blistering under the August sun, it is but a night's journey to the cool green May which, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lasts until the beginning of autumn. During the worst of the heated term of 1896, when people died of sunstroke by the hundred in every great city of the United States, the boy and I, in ulsters and mittens, joyously trod the deck of a gulf schooner, while the Saguenay sailors worked her against head-winds blowing fresh from the innumerable icecold lakes of Labrador and the primeval solitudes of the Laurentian Mountains.

The vast country north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is, to the uncommercial explorer, the most interesting region on this continent, if not in the world. For nearly four centuries the ships of civilization have sailed by it, yet, except at the very water's edge, there has been no intrusion upon it. The rivers which pour forth from every opening in the hills bear witness that the back country is a net-work of lakes and water-courses. Ask the Commissioner of Crown Lands of the great Province of Quebec to-day what his department knows of that region, and he will tell you that it is the least known portion of North America; that only a few of the lakes have been surveyed; that two exploring parties have

VOL. XXII.-34

But

recently crossed the peninsula; that a handful of fishermen's houses fringe the gulf; that for the rest of it, the wandering Montagnais Indians are the only tourists who traverse half a million square miles of territory. Steamers go up the Saguenay. Lake St. John is reached by rail. away to the northeast is a tremendous tract of country, from whence issue streams greater than the Hudson, the headwaters of which no white man has ever seen. How many Americans, if asked to mention the beautiful rivers of the continent, could give even the names of the Bersimis, the Outardes, the Manicouagan, the Misticapin, the Moisie, the Mingan, the Romaine, the Natashquan, the Olomonosheeboo, the Meccatina, the Esquimaux ? Only a few salmon fisherman, who are the most indefatigable of sportsmen, would recognize them.

It was to view this neglected summer seacoast that the boy and I left Quebec last summer, to go to Tadousac by a steamer as fine as any floating hotel of the Sound, and to proceed beyond Tadousac by such means as could thereafter be devised. We went for a lazy cruise, and to see some of the wonderful salmon streams of that country.

Before leaving Quebec we had secured a permit from the Crown Land Office "to fish in the waters not presently under lease, or in which the fishing rights belong to the province, on the north shore of the Gulf of

St. Lawrence, from Pointe de Monts up to Blanc Sablon. Said permit shall be good for two months."

"And if you fish in all those rivers," said the smiling Deputy Commissioner, "you will not come back this summer, or the next, either." We found this to be true, because only a small part of the fishing rivers of that shore were under private lease in 1896, and a beautiful stream breaks through the mountains about every ten miles.

It was evening and low tide when we clambered up the slanting gang-plank at

it being midsummer and a dull season, we soon chartered the ship, her cook, her captain bold, her mate and her crew, for $180 a month. That was enough for one evening. The missing Robitois, sailor at $8 a month, went ashore to postpone weddingbells, which now would not ring for him until our return. Besides, the tide must be waited for, and we slept at the hotel, the last one this side of the north pole along that coast.

The six hours of northern summer night soon passed, and then we swung out with

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Tadousac, and stood on the dock, as high as a cottage roof above the water. Just around the point, in the deep little bay, two or three schooner-lights blinked and nodded in a sleepy way, as the vessels swung at anchor on the gentle swells. Tadousac is somewhere near three centuries old, and it has fully twenty houses already. The mountains rise in grandeur behind the place, and the Saguenay, six hundred feet deep, pours copiously at its feet.

The owner of one of the schooners was at home, for his vessel had just returned, after a highly successful delivery of lumber from St. Anne des Monts to Quebec, and,

the tide, and sailed away through the morning mist to Rivière du Loup, on the South Shore, where Henry Braithwaite, guide extraordinary, all the way from New Brunswick, with provisions and birch-bark canoes, and silent Malicete Indians, waited to be taken aboard. On the way across the wide St. Lawrence a summer thunderstorm broke, but the forty-foot sails were not reefed; the yacht-like freighter heeled till her deck was like the roof of a house, and she made the twenty-four miles in two hours, while the porpoises puffed and blew, and arched their sinuous white backs all around us.

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die, visit the northeastern Canadian coast in summer, under the personal conducting of good guides. The faithful Braithwaite had planned for weeks. We had projected this invasion of the North a whole year before, while searching for the elusive moose of the Miramichi; and when we made fast at the dock at Rivière du Loup, all was ready. Canoes and bundles and Indians were soon on board, and away we flew, between the dim blue hills that mark the receding shores of the great river of Canada, every breeze and every turning tide bearing us prosperously farther north and east. It was a polyglot crowd on that schoonThere were Canadian sailors who spoke no English; the Indian, Baptiste, who spoke French and Malicete; Francis, from Old Town, Me., whose Malicete

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er.

Portaging on the Mingan.

In Tadousac Harbor.

and Abenaki were beyond criticism, and whose careful English was a reminder of the speech of the Honorable Thomas Brackett Reed. So, for any complicated message, there was a tortuous channel, via Francis and Baptiste, to the Canadian skipper's French and back again; and the Lord knows how the translations fared in transit.

What a gambler's game a sailing vessel plays. Some days we sailed and sailed. Sometimes we went to bed with a headland in sight, and in the morning, after hours of seeming progress, it had been an undecided contest between wind and tide, and we were still there. One day a southwest gale swept us over galloping green hills; while the next the sails flapped and clattered as the schooner reeled helplessly on hummocks of leaden water, without a breath of air stirring.

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One great charm about this region is

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