It was here that the Northern road came to an end. Beyond lay the wilderness, across which, when the sun is beating down, even the nomad Lapp would be hard put to it to find a path. All bird life has perished or fled. The winged creatures which hold possession are the horsefly and the mosquito. Farther our car could not have gone, for we had heard of travelers venturing afoot into those wilds, scrambling for days through the slimy

ing herds of reindeer feeding on the yellow mosses of the dreary earth-patches of the Lapp mark. Also we might have seen something of those battered, shaggy semiwrecks of men and sallow, pigeon-chested women of that far Northland, the victims of generations of inbreeding, existing in veritable wallows, amid toil and starvation, the strain of the wilderness, and the fever from insect bites and wretched food.

But we preferred civilization, and so

returned to Gellivare, with that pleasant sense of relaxation which comes of a deed accomplished. We had broken away from only a few of the things associated with the complex fabric of highly organized society, but as before going southward we halted there at the frontier of human industry and habitation, we could look ahead and see where the trail, leaving the bounds of exact ownership, frayed like a rope'send and fluttered across the wastes of the frozen North.

IT was in the evening that we reached Heden, and six hours after leaving Malmberget we again put up at the postingstation. From Heden our route took us back to Morjarv, and there the road forked to the left for Haparanda and the land of the Finns. We were rapidly forgetting our Northern experiences and the belated exhilaration over our accomplishment in the eagerness with which we contemplated making the acquaintance of the race which, though subject to a Russian yoke, has strange kinship with the Magyar of Hungary. At first the roads were none of the best, but after six hours of continuous running we managed to make the frontier at Haparanda and once more to catch a glimpse of the Gulf of Bothnia. There we stopped and recovered the money which we had deposited as duty upon entering Sweden. The Russian duty we paid at the neighboring Finnish town of Tornea, where we enjoyed the rare spectacle of a beautiful sunset at half-past eleven at night. The following day we had the unique experience of crossing from one town to the other by sail-ferry. There were several more ferries to be crossed in that long run down the superb Finnish coast and through the country, over a good post-road at twenty-five miles an hour all the way to Helsingfors. Occasionally we saw two-wheeled carioles taking the steep pitches in the roads at full gallop behind the sturdy Finnish horses.

As we drew near our Southern goal, the Finnish capital, the days became perceptibly shorter; but there was no cessation of the heat, and our enemies, the mosquitos and flies, were still with us, so that we had to take refuge beneath veils. At all hours the insects swarmed about us, eagerly seeking the slightest opening in our veils. We were told that the only fortification against these thirsty enemies of man in the Northern summer is to saturate the head in the smoke of young twigs, very much as a ham is cured; but, needless to say, we preferred hand-to-hand conflict to a procedure which savored of suicide.

The Finnish peasant we found to be unpicturesque, a figure in strong contrast to his country, which, in its alternation of lake and stream and hillside, was a rare delight to the eye. The deep green of boundless forests accorded a sharp but not unpleasant note to the red which dominates Finnish architecture and is the official color of the country. It was in these Northern forests that we obtained a lively conception of the old Norse gods' habitation-Vidar's impenetrable, primeval woods, where reigned deep silence and solitude. We saw stretching before us boundless expanses of lofty trees, almost without a path among them, regions of monstrous shadows and cloistered gloom, and we felt the grandeur of the idea which forms the basis of Vidar's essence. seemed as though we were amid the beginning of all things, in the very presence of the Norseman's All-father.

It

And as we look back now upon the days we passed deep in the solitudes of the North, we feel that it was a wonderful world the fringe of which we crossed. We had come into touch with strange and wonderful people, living in days that had no end-a people whose minds have conceived of a world created from a strange admixture of fire and ice, wherein the forces of nature, the good and the bad, are ceaselessly struggling.

Andrew Wake Holman, was a private in Company C, of Colonel Humphrey Marshall's Regiment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen County,-"Sweet Owen," as it used to be called,—and came of good stock, his father, Colonel Harry Holman, a frontier celebrity in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism. Company C, out “on a scout," was picked off by the Mexicans, and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not being clearly established, a drum-head court-martial ordered “the decimation.”

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be shot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans, ninety white and ten black, were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on dress-parade, Whoever drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoever drew a black bean was to die.

than being willing to die for him?-is the bravest thing I know, or have ever been told of mortal man.

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56, he was in Nicaragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War of Secession. After the war, he lived the life of a hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky, a cheery, unambitious, big-brained, and big-hearted cherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit, with entire safety you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability. To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the love of life and the art of living. Yet was there a reserve, not to say a reticence, touching himself. During all my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, common sense, and courage. I held him in real affection and honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress, I took his papers to General Black, the Commissoner of Pensions, and related this story.

I have seen a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering both in women and men, splendid courage on the field of action, perfect selt-possession in the face of danger: but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit that day-next to actually

Williams," said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners But." said the General as he looked beamingly into my face, “Wake Holman's name shall come next." And there it is.

I

WAS a boy fourteen years of age when I witnessed the following deed of rare courage and bravery.

The winter of 1878-79 was severely cold for two months prior to February, when several days of unsettled rainy weather caused a tremendous rise in the Maumee River. The breaking up of the twofoot ice in the river was the source of much damage for miles up and down the valley. Among other disasters was the demolishment of a half-mile wooden bridge across the stream at Napoleon, Ohio.

As the rainy weather cleared the Maumee of ice, steps were taken for the building of a ferry over the river, which divides the town into two parts. A cable was firmly anchored on each shore, and by means of pulleys a flat-bottomed boat, capable of carrying a considerable load, was put in use for the transportation of man and beast. This was in use only in the daytime.

The waters continuing to rise, the river became a mass of mad, swirling, muddy water.

In the middle of the stream the water overflowed the ferry-cable for a distance of a hundred feet or more. Theswiftly running current would carry the cable to its utmost tension, and, when released, it would spring up-stream with a wicked swish, like the snapping of a bowstring.

About nine o'clock on the night of February 15, word came to Duncan Dore, an uncanny Scot, who resided on the south side of the river, that his mother, over on the north side, was seriously ill. Scotch stubbornness must have had something to do with his determination to attempt a crossing of the turbulent stream.

An intimate friend of Dore's, one Ortez Randall, being the owner of a small skiff, Dore secured it and determined to cross alone. Randall, however, begged so hard to accompany him that Dore finally yielded, and the two men launched their boat. Being extremely anxious to reach the other side as quickly as possible, they ignored the advice of several men who went with them to the bank, and launched their boat up-stream from the ferry-cable,

but without taking into calculation the swiftness of the current in midstream.

Less than fifteen minutes after they had left the shore the men, who were waiting to hear the cry, "All 's well," were startled by agonizing shouts for help. It was surmised that Dore and Randall had been caught by the bowstring ferry-cable and their boat overturned. The cries continuing to come out of the blackness of the night, the men on shore reasoned that the two men had caught the cable as their boat was wrecked, and were clinging to it.

This was exactly what had happened, and the swiftly running water carried the two men to the limit of tension in the rope and then rebounded through icy water to the place of starting. Men could not long endure that experience.

Among the men who had heard the cries for help was a herculean woodsman by the name of Allen Mann. Calling to the others to help him launch another boat below the ferry-cable, he quickly divested himself of superfluous clothing and pushed out into the stream.

For half an hour he bravely battled with the current before his efforts were of any avail and he was in a position to help the men, whose cries were becoming fainter.

Finally reaching a point just below the spot where the cable left the water on its rebound, he turned his boat up-stream and rowed as man never rowed before.

In the meantime Dore and Randall had worked their way along the rope until they were near together, and as they were swept downward toward the waiting rescuer, Mann yelled, "Let go!"

The two men heard him and, realizing that help was below, obeyed his command. Mann ceased rowing, reached over the side, seized the two men, worked them around to the stern of the boat, and by a tremendous effort of strength pulled both in, where they sank exhausted. They landed a mile below, but were quickly conveyed to anxious friends and relatives.

This was before the day of Carnegie medals, and no special attention was given to the bravery of Allen Mann.

Ring through a picturesque country:

EADING history is much like travel

every one is expected to see the striking features, which the guide-books will not fail to point out. But of the quiet places by the wayside, the hidden valleys, and the mountain springs-of these the tourist, hurrying through history, will know but little.

There are not a few such unfamiliar but interesting side paths in religious history. The great leaders and reformers we know; but besides the conspicuous actors, there have been from time to time men of moderation, fashioned in a gentler mold and of lucid reasonableness, characters once of much attractiveness in the circles of those who felt their influence, whose names have been almost forgotten, and whose writings are preserved, but rarely read, in unfrequented recesses of old libraries. Yet we owe much that is best and fairest in the life and ideals of our time to this succession of men of largeminded charity in ages of intolerance, a truly apostolic succession, although uncanonized, after the order of that great Apostle who left to his followers this injunction, "Let your moderation”—or, as the word may be read-"Let your reasonableness be known unto all men."

One of these byways of history well worth our following is disclosed in the letters of Leibnitz, Mme. de Brinon, and others who in the latter part of the seventeenth century were engaged in serious efforts to restore the lost unity between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches. Though our histories scarcely

notice this episode, it was a scene in which were interested princes and princesses; theologians and statesmen; the Protestant Leibnitz, at that time the greatest philosophical mind of Europe; the Roman Catholic Bossuet, the most famous orator of France; the Emperor Leopold, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire; the French King Louis XIV; and two popes, Innocent XI and his successor. Some of the most notable women of the time were likewise so deeply interested in it that, it is said, they did not find the long epistles of learned scholars and divines dry reading. One of them, Mme. de Brinon, through whose hands many of the letters passed, was indefatigable in her zeal to bring the matter to successful issue, giving the correspondents little rest in her endeavors to keep up the negotiations. It was of her that Pellisson, a French Catholic, who was engaged in the correspondence, wrote to Leibnitz: "Madame de Brinon finds fault with me on your account. She says, and I believe she is right, that we think of nothing else but your dynamics, and not at all of your conversion, which is the one object of her desire, as of mine."

This movement, though carried on for thirty years, made little noise. The letters were purposely not printed, and remained for many years afterward unpublished. The whole narrative of it might well be recalled now because it contains much of suggestive value in relation to present questions concerning the reconciliation of the unhappy divisions of the church.

To this object at that time, a Roman