My immediate need was to get back to poor old Lovey and lie down by his side. That again was beyond my power to analyze. I suppose it was something like a homing instinct, and Lovey was all there was to welcome me. “Is that you, sonny?” he asked, sleepily, as I stooped to creep into the cubby-hole which a chance arrangement of planks made in a pile of lumber. “Yes, Lovey.” “Glad ye’ve come.” When I had stretched myself out I felt him snuggle a little nearer me. “You don’t mind, sonny, do you?” “No, Lovey. It’s all right. Go to sleep again.” For myself, I could do nothing but lie and watch the coming of the dawn. I could see it beating itself into the darkness long before there was anything to which one could give the name of light. It was like a succession of great cosmic throbs, after each of which the veil was a little more translucent. In my nostrils was the sweet, penetrating smell of lumber, subtly laden with the memories of the days when I was a boy. The Canadian differs from the American largely, I think, in the closeness of his forest-and-farm associations. Not that the American hasn’t the farm and the forest, too, but he has moved farther away from them. The mill, the factory, and the office have supplanted them—in imagination when not in fact, and in fact when not in imagination. If the woods call him he has to go to them—for a week, or two, or three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life in which the woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life. The primeval still enters into his cities and his thoughts. Some day it may be different; but as yet he is the son of rivers, lakes, and forests. There is always in him a strain of the _voyageur_. The true Canadian never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild shores. It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed me as the river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of paddle-wheels, followed by a bellow like the call of some sea monster to its mate. Right below me and close to the slip I heard the measured dip of oars. Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or from deck to dock, had a weird, watchful sound, as though the darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen. Lights glided up and down the river—which itself remained unseen—mostly gold lights, but now and then a colored one. Chains of lights fringed the New Jersey shore, where, far away, sleepless factories threw up dim red flares. A rising southeast wind not only hid the stars under banks of clouds, but went whistling eerily round the corners of the lumber-piles. The scent of pine, and all the pungent, nameless odors of the riverside, began to be infused with the smell—if it is a smell—of coming rain.