When the meal was over, Jim began to talk in his slow, caustic way. Like many men who have passed their lives in the open air and solitude, Jim had acquired a certain rude philosophy, the fruit of much silent thinking, experience, and observation. He had worked in lumber-camps, mines, and on the railroads, but only by necessity; no sooner had he acquired a little money than he had always gone off into solitude again. Carrying all his scant possessions with him, he would disappear into the forests and mountains, and would be lost to sight for many months. What was he doing? Hunting, prospecting for gold and copper, and loafing. He would return from these expeditions not a penny piece the richer, a little raggeder, and with deeper lines upon his face, having often suffered great privations, yet at the first opportunity he would resume them. For all settled ways of life he had a positive aversion, and not all the gold of Golconda could have bribed him to reside in cities. This was the more remarkable because he had spent his childhood and early youth in Liverpool, from which dim and dreary city he had been thrust out by chance and poverty into the Canadian wilderness. Till he landed in Canada he had never seen a forest or a mountain, had scarcely looked upon a flower, and had breathed only the tainted air of slums; but on his first view of the wooded heights of Montreal, something woke in his heart, a dumb love of Nature, a passion for freedom, an appetite for solitude. Friends he had none, and if he ever had relations, he had long ago forgotten them. Thus left wholly to himself, he had fashioned his own way of life with neither memory nor obligation to restrain him; had considered his debt to civilization cancelled; had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a taciturn but contented nomad, whose feet had traversed the breadth of a mighty continent, and penetrated a hundred savage solitudes where none but he had trodden. Thus, in his own way, he had solved the problem of existence; he had achieved freedom, and had enrolled himself among the humble Argonauts of Empire. The greatness of this half-discovered empire was his chief thought, and upon this theme he was always ready to speak. "England don't know what she's got in Canada," was a frequent sentiment of his, often expressed with biting scorn. "She sends her worst out here," he would continue--"dumps her rubbish on us." He made this remark now, to which Arthur replied with a laugh, "I hope you don't consider me rubbish, Jim." "No, you're young, and I guess you're strong. But there's lots of hard work ahead of you, and I've seen many a chap like you fly the tracks." "I wish you'd tell me what I've got to do." "Well, I ain't no fruit-rancher myself," said Jim. "But maybe I can teach you. Suppose you and me take a look round."