with the bark on, nailed together at the apex, and where it projected well beyond the gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the window-frames and the door-panels were covered with bark. It was of the same tone because of the selfsame substance as the forest still growing around it, and it gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness. It gave the feeling that it belonged where it was placed. It is ill praising one's own work, but I had been keen to see how it would strike me, fresh from the outside, after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed that it pleased me again. [Sidenote: A STARVING WHITE MAN] I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome that waited at Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still wondering at the homelike cosiness which the mission house had assumed under the deft hands of the two ladies who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of a white man he had found starving in the wilderness fifteen miles away. Another native with a dog team and a supply of immediate food was hastily despatched to bring the man in, and that night the poor emaciated fellow, looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and tottered into the house. He had started out from Tanana two months before with two pack-horses to make his way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his way and wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had been drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had made a raft to come down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek) to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was a trading-post near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few spoonfuls of meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or twice a ptarmigan, and when Ned found him was at the last extremity and had given up, intending to die where he was.