Away and downward swept the boat. The strong eddies caught it, but the controlling paddle was stronger than the eddies and kept it to the line of its safest descent. Past rocks that stood in mid current, against which the swift-going water beat and dashed--past mossy banks and shadowed curves where the great eddies whirled--down over miniature falls into bubbles and froth the light craft swept, and with a final plunge and leap jumped the last cascade, and, darting out into the great basin, ran shoreward. It touched the beach, and the trapper and Herbert rose to their feet; but for a moment neither stirred, for in front of them, not thirty feet away, at the line where the sand and the green mosses met, and looking directly at them, _stood a man and a girl_! * * * * * WHO WAS HE? The two men asked this question a thousand times mentally in the next two months, and once afterward they asked it aloud, as they looked into each other's eyes across a grave. But to the question, whether spoken or silent, no answer ever came. The world has its enigmas, and he was one. Amid the jabbering crowd we chaff and chatter with, we meet occasionally a man who never chaffs nor chatters,--a man who sees all things; perhaps because of this, suffers all things, but says nothing at all. The sphinxes are still extant. The old time ones were of stone and bronze; the modern ones are of flesh and blood; that's all the difference. Nay, not quite all; for the secrets that the ancients held smothered within the folds of their stony silence were only such as nature revealed to them from her desert posts,--the secrets of sunrises and starry nights and simoons that swept the sandy plain and of civilizations, the murmurs of whose rising and the crash of whose sudden overthrow, they needs must hear. But the secrets that men hear today, and by hearing of which are made silent, are the secrets of lives being lived, of hearts being broken, of intentions so noble and failures so bitter as to make men sceptical whether God keeps watch over the passing events on the earth. Was he young? No. Was he old? No, again. How old was he? Forty, perhaps; it may be fifty. The two men who stood looking at him never thought of his age, neither then nor afterward; never thought whether he was old or young. There are people who have no age to those who know them. Is it because their bodies so little represent them? A friend has been away--for years. He returns; enters your room; you shake his hand heartily in welcome. And then you stand off and look at him. You look at his hair and note the gray in it--at the wrinkles in his face--the dozen and one marks that denote change--and say, "you've grown old, old boy;" and so we judge most men, and so they should be judged. Why? Because they are not great and strong and soul-large enough to dwarf their bodies out of sight and dwindle them into insignificance.