"Billy," I said, "I love you, but I don't like your business. It's a bad business. See what it has done to lots of good fellows around here. You are too big for that game. I wish you'd drop it and do something that's clean--that doesn't hurt anybody." Bill made no reply, and I supposed my words had been fruitless. But in a few weeks one of my friends informed me that Bill had sold out and had gone to gold-mining. "That's good!" I exclaimed. "Did he give any reason?" "Yes," the man replied, "Bill said you told him to." When I was returning to Alaska in 1901, I bought a nice buffalo smoking-set at the Pan-American Exposition and took it to Alaska for Bunch-grass Bill. I did not see him, as he was mining at a distance, but I heard of his pride and pleasure as he displayed the gift and talked affectionately of "Father Young." He left Alaska that summer, and I have heard vaguely of his presence in the Nevada gold-fields. But wherever he is, I pray that God may bless and save the Irish saloon-keeper, who loved me and saved my life. IV MY DOGS Mushing with dogs in Alaska is the worst and the best mode of traveling in all the world--the most joyful and the most exasperating--according to the angle from which you look at it. Once I was preaching a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments to the miners at Council, a town on Seward Peninsula eighty-five miles east of Nome. I had come to the Third Commandment; and I bore down pretty hard upon the useless and foolish habit of profane swearing. When I was going home from the meeting, a group of young men stood on the corner waiting for me. "Come over here, Doctor," called one of the men. "I have a bet with Jim, and I want you to decide it." I crossed over to the jolly group. "What is your bet?" I asked. "Why," he replied, "I've bet Jim five dollars that you have never mushed a dog-team." "Well, you've lost," I answered. "I have driven dogs many times--and never found it necessary to swear at them, either." Before I go on with my story, perhaps I would better explain that word "mush," as it is used in the Northwest. The word is never used in Alaska as you use it in the East, to denote porridge, or some sort of cereal. There we say "oatmeal" or "corn-meal," or simply "cereal." In Alaska the word has but one use. It is a corruption of the French _marchez, marche_, which the Canadian _coureurs du bois_, or travelers of the woods, shout at their dogs when urging them along the trail. From _marche_ to "mush" is easy. So now, throughout the great Northwest, Canadian or Alaskan, when a man is traveling he is "on a mush." When he is speaking to his dogs, either to drive them out of the house or to urge them along the trail, he shouts "mush!" If he be a good traveler, he is a "great musher." Of all the pet names they used to give me up there, the one of which I was proudest was "The Mushing Parson."