guide discovered this, he grunted out a guttural prophecy that the shoot would be good. 

 Strange mixtures these guides were; the combination of French suavity and redskin cunning being a continual wonder to Andrew, accustomed as he was to less complex types. 

 This man who slept sometimes rolled close in the same blankets with him for warmth, whose woodcraft made his less intuitive knowledge seem absolute ignorance, whose judgment in matters of the chase was almost flawless, whose strength and agility would not have shamed a Greek—this man cooked his meals, washed the dishes, waited upon him deferentially, and was not to be persuaded to eat at the same time. In the chase, a hero; in the camp, a slave. 

 What tramps those were through the silent solitudes of these untrodden woods! What moments had been his, when, leaving his guide preparing the camp for the night, Andrew had gained some high ridge, and pausing, looked far across the peaks of graduated hills, clad in sombre cedars weighted down with snow, white, silent, yet instinct with that mystery which presses upon us pleading for elucidation, and never so strongly as when we are alone with the unblotted world before us, away from the signs of man's desecration. There is something very pitiful in that mute appeal of nature to be understood—like some sweet woman, smitten into a spell of suffering silence, till such time as the magic word shall release her. A word she knows, yet cannot, of her own power, speak. What magical mysteries shall not be revealed when speech is restored to her! And how her eyes plead and accuse at once! Of a verity, having ears we hear not: truly, having eyes to see, yet are we blind! 

 For there is some great open secret surely in the universe, that being deciphered will set all our jangling dreams in chime. It is about us, around us, above us; the tiniest leaf tells it, the stars of heaven proclaim it, the water manifests it and the earth declares it, and yet we do not see it. When we do, it will be some simple vital principle that we have breathed with the breath of our lips, and handled with the familiar fingers of the flesh. We will be so unable to conceive of the world moving on in ignorance of it, that all the wisdom of the ages past will seem but as the howling of wolves in waste places, or at best, as the babbling of children that play with dry sand, now letting it slip through their fingers, leaving them with empty hands, now getting it in their eyes to torture them, or treading on it with vague discomfort and unease. 

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