Page:Scribner's Magazine Volume 1.djvu/255

Rh loves to come over and smoke, and listen to his grandchildren talk, and hold the youngest on his knees. But now it is always the Ducharmes of the Castor; no more the Ducharmes of the Baskatonge.

In the heart of a northern wilderness, on the shore of an unnamed lake, stands the ruin of a small hut. Half the roof has fallen in. The logs are rotted and covered with moss. In the dark corners spectral weeds and ferns die longing for the sun. The spring winds, touching the water lightly, make ripples that never reach the shore. In early summer the small, shadowy clouds drift dreamily out of the west and vanish like a vision. In autumn the sky is flushed and knotted, like the forehead of an angry god; a wakeful bird, somewhere in the bushes, utters a few long-drawn, passionate notes; the night that follows is dark and starless, and the wind, searching for forgotten paths among the trees, heaves long, low, tremulous sighs. The winter wind, untamed out of the north, drives the sifted snow, hissing like steam, across the surface of the lake. The haunts of men seem as far away as the stars that throb faintly in the lonely vastness of the summer sky. The silence that dwells forever in the waste places of the world is shaken by unheeded storms and the muffled cries of life in the gloom of the immense forests that darken beneath her brooding wings.



Bold text