Rainy Lake City was a few acres roughly cleared from the primæval forest, yet with avenues cut through the dense trees to indicate streets where tramcars were to run at some future date. River, lake and forest combined to make an enchanting scene. There were perhaps a hundred men there. There was gold, but there was no gold-dust, no shining pans to sift the precious sand; in a word, no placer-mining. It was all quartz; machinery to crush the quartz had to be dragged in over the ice in the winter. Capital was essential, large lumps of capital. A word of inquiry in New York could have told me this. I felt rather guilty, but very happy. Paxton and R.M. were philosophical. No word of blame escaped their lips. They had the right to curse me, whereas both played the part of Balaam. Even at the time I thought this odd. Neither of them seemed to care a straw. “We’ll stake a claim,” said R.M. at intervals. Perhaps both were so pleased to have arrived safely that they neither grumbled nor abused me. The truth was that, like myself, though for rather different reasons, both of them were relieved to be “away from home.” The engineer, I discovered later, was glad that 1,500 miles lay between him and New York City. We pitched our tent by the shore and proceeded to investigate. Living cost little. It was sunny weather, it was spring. One company was already sinking a shaft and working a small crusher; there were shacks and shanties everywhere; the “city” was as peaceful as the inside of St. Paul’s Cathedral; we saw no hairy men, but we saw mosquitoes. With the first warm nights these pests emerged for the season in their millions; they were very large and very hungry; they hung in the air like clouds of smoke; they welcomed us; as R.M. said, they had probably written the newspaper accounts that advertised the place. We had no netting. They stung the bears blind; they would have stung a baby to death, had there been any babies, except ourselves, to sting. The only gold we saw was a lump, valued at $5,000, lying beside a revolver on the counter of the Bank of Montreal’s shack. The clerk allowed us to hold it for a second each. It was the only gold we touched.... We investigated, as mentioned; we wandered about; we fished and shot, we rubbed Indian stuff over our faces to keep the mosquitoes off; we enjoyed happy, careless, easy days, bathing in ice-cold water, basking in hot sunshine, resting, loafing, and spinning yarns with all and sundry round our camp-fires. After New York it was a paradise, and but for the mosquitoes, we could have dressed in fig leaves.