C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

The Unrelenting North8rmedicine, so they gave me the best physic in the world, a good tot of Jamaica rumand then they built me up in pretty good mason's work and plastered me in till Igot to San Francisco. The man in the bows? Why he joined the silent majoritywithin the week. I guess I was pretty near the bone-yard that time."One day we discussed our journey with him. Was it true, as the old-timersassured us, that only lunatics and fish travelled by the Rat River route insummer? Was it true that the mosquitoes there were as thick as spruce needles ona branch? He took out his pipe and spat over the balcony with a thoughtful air."Them old-timers," he said, "they like to paint the country black, gives them akind of reflected glory for having stuck it so long. But I never was that way myself.The north country is tough and cruel, you can't deny it. 'Tis no bed-o-roses,balmy, cradle life up here, nine months frozen hard and three months persecutedby them darned flies, but here we are for better or for worse and I believe ifwe stick by the country, why, the country will stick by us. The Rat River ain't noasphalt pavement laid for patent leathers but there it is, 'tis a trail same as anyother and you'll get over all right."There is no doubt that the captain had spent a life of unceasing action withvery little time for anything else, ever since the day when he left the old folks andran away to sea. Fishing, hunting, whaling, suffering shipwreck, seeking for goldand spending in three days what he had gathered in a year, that was his life.Judging by our all-too-easy standards he had been "up against it," all the timeand everywhere from his sterner point of view he had got as good a fate as anyother man. Even in that brief Arctic summer when the sun shone all night and allday, and bright wild flowers starred the ground between the spruces, there wouldbe snow on the distant hills and lumps of frozen soil would fall from the concavebanks into the river. Even in his palmy days he had neither butter, eggs nor milk.The grandest home he had ever called his own was a cabin of rough logs and thesimplest one a sleeping bag of fur in the snow. He was a man of the North, toughand hardened by endurance. In his every word and comment you felt a keenedge, like the edge of the Arctic wind. No flotsam or jetsam of the North was ourfriend but a man tempered by circumstance and climate to the finest quality.Yet the strangest thing was, that in the company of this man of action, welistened to his language spellbound, as if we had found in him a modernDemosthenes or Bossuet. Somehow he must have found, in his life of action,time for thought and speech, for these were closely knit, with never any hesitationor inconsistency. He had an unusual utterance, rather slow but never