Under the first pale lilac wash of evening, just where the slow stream of the Lost-Water slipped placidly from the open meadows into the osier-and-bulrush tangles of the swamp, a hermit thrush, perched in the topmost spray of a young elm tree, was fluting out his lonely and tranquil ecstasy to the last of the sunset. • • • • It was high morning in the heart of the swamp. From a sky of purest cobalt flecked sparsely with silver-white wisps of cloud, the sun glowed down with tempered, fruitful warmth upon the tender green of the half-grown rushes and already rank water-grasses—the young leafage of the alder and willow thickets—the wide pools and narrow, linking lanes of unruffled water already mantling in spots with lily-pad and arrow-weed. A few big red-and-black butterflies wavered aimlessly above the reed-tops. Here and there, with a faint elfin clashing of transparent wings, a dragon-fly, a gleam of emerald and amethyst fire, flashed low over the water. From every thicket came a soft chatter of the nesting red-shouldered blackbirds. These stories are lyrical poems in prose; as an impressionistic stylist in the medium of the animal short story Roberts is inimitable. We find the same mellifluous prose (as Mr. T. G. Marquis discriminatingly terms it) in his romantic short stories, _By the Marshes of Minas_, in which themes, settings, and color are authentically Canadian (Acadian). Gilbert Parker’s short stories exhibit many of the qualities of his longer fiction. They are not always as artistically constructed as those of Duncan Campbell Scott, nor are they as finely written as those of Roberts, but in the main they are based on sufficient character motivation and have a sustained dramatic power. Ernest Thompson Seton and W. A. Fraser are engaging tellers of short tales abounding in incident and humor, with a sound basis of characterization, yet of the short story writers of the Systematic School, Duncan Campbell Scott has produced the most uniformly excellent work. CHAPTER XVIII William Henry Drummond THE NEW CANADIAN GENRE OF IDYLLIC POETRY—WILLIAM HENRY DRUMMOND, INTERPRETER OF THE HABITANT—POET OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN CANADA. The Canadian _voyageur_ and _habitant_, the lumberman, and peasant of French Canada are ‘children of nature’—human, simple, shy, warm-hearted, honest, and manly. They were not always thus sympathetically conceived or regarded by most of their English-speaking compatriots. They, therefore, needed a sympathetic interpreter who would reveal their inward spirit and true character, mental and moral. Strangely, but according to the inscrutable methods of Providence, the man who was to be the friend and sympathetic interpreter of the French-Canadian peasant, was born in Ireland in 1854. He was William Henry Drummond.