enough to draw Geoffrey twenty miles out of his course. Of the two guides, one deserted before they had crossed the range, making off quietly with one of their horses—the best, by the way—and leaving them, after a long day and night of wonderment, to the melancholy conviction that they had been cheated. They retraced their way for one day’s journey, sent their other guide, an Indian, back some distance in search of the deserter, but with no result. This cost them between three and four days. The man had doubtless gone quietly back to Edmonton. To follow him farther would be altogether to abandon their expedition for this year. The days they had already lost were precious as rubies. ‘_En avant!_’ exclaimed Geoffrey. ‘Excelsior!’ cried Lucius. The German was quiescent. ‘I zink you leat me to my deaths,’ he said; ‘but man must die one time. Gismet, as the Durks say. They are wise beobles, ze Durks.’ The Indian promised to remain faithful, ay, even to death; of which fatal issue these savages think somewhat lightly; life for them mostly signifying hardship and privation, brightened only by rare libations of rum. He was promoted from a secondary position to the front rank, and was now their sole guide. With their cavalcade thus shrunken they pushed bravely on, crossed the mountains by the Yellow Head Pass, looked down from among snow-clad pinnacles upon the Athabasca river, rushing madly between its steep banks, and reached Jasper House, a station of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which they found void of all human life, a mere shell or empty simulacrum; in the distance a cheering object to look upon, promising welcome and shelter; and giving neither. For Hossack, that mighty mountain range, those snow-clad peaks, towering skyward, had an irresistible attraction. He had done a good deal of Alpine climbing in his long vacations, had scaled peaks which few have ever succeeded in surmounting, and had made his name a household word among the Swiss guides, but such a range as this was new to him. Here there was a larger splendour, an infinite beauty. The world which he had looked down upon from Mont Blanc—lakes, valleys, and villages dwarfed by the distance—was a mere tea-board landscape, a toy-shop panorama, compared with this. He drew in his breath and gazed in a dumb rapture, ‘Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific.’