It was all in the proper spirit of gold-seeking adventure, begad! and the comic-opera touch, so far as I was concerned, had not yet quite fully appeared. I had cut loose from everything. I felt as though I were jumping off the rim of the planet into unknown space. It was a delightful, reckless, half naughty, half childish, feeling. “To hell with civilization!” was its note. At the back of the mind lay a series of highly-coloured pictures: Men made fortunes in a night, human life was cheap, six-shooters lay beside tin mugs at camp-fire breakfasts, and bags of “dust” were tossed across faro-tables from one desperado in a broad-brimmed hat to another who was either an Oxford don _incognito_, or an unfrocked clergyman, or a younger son concealing tragic beauty in an over-cultured heart, with perhaps an unclaimed title on his strawberry-marked skin. R.M., too, was forever talking about staking claims: “We’ll get grub-staked by some fellow.... If we only pan a few ounces per day it’ll mean success ...” to all of which Paxton emitted his “Ouch! Ouch!” as a strong man who said little because he preferred action to words. I, meanwhile, had no accurate information to supply, though I was the promoter of the expedition. I paraded the newspaper accounts. They were of little use. Nothing, in fact, was of any use. We were in different worlds. _They_ were in an Emigrant Sleeper skirting the shores of Lake Superior. _I_ was on the look-out for the Witch of Atlas, wandering through the pine forest of the Cascine near Pisa, dreaming in the Indian Caucasus, or watching Serchio’s stream. Even “Ouch! Ouch!” could not keep me in Ontario for long. It all lies down the wrong end of that ever-lengthening telescope now, our trip to the Rainy River Gold Fields. Happy, careless, foolish days of sunlight, liberty, wood-smoke and virgin wilderness. Useless days, of course, yet sweetly perfumed as in a dream of fairyland. I revelled in them. New York was still close enough to lend them some incredible glamour by contrast. That no gold came our way was nothing, that the days came to an end was bitter. Fading into mist, behind veils of blue smoke, yet lit by sheets of burning sunshine, lies the faint outline still. Each year drops another gauze curtain over an entrancing and ridiculous adventure that for my companions was disappointingly empty, but to me was filled to the brim with wonder and delight. A few sharp pictures, rather disconnected, defy both veils and curtains, set against a dim background of wild forest, a blue winding river with strange red shores, swift rapids, and cosy camp-fires at dawn, at sunset, beneath the stars, beneath the moon. The stillness of those grand woods is unforgettable; the voice of the river was unceasing, yet broke no silence; the smells of balsam, resinous pitch-pine, cedar smoke rise like incense above the memory of it all.