They made camp under the maples after a look at the moldy cabin interior. The stars came out to speckle a cloudless sky as they sat over their evening fire. Before they turned into blankets spread on a layer of fern and hemlock boughs, a moon sailed up from behind the Coast range. It touched all the hills with a silver glow, filled every hollow with ebony shade. They fell asleep to the lullaby of falling water and wakened with the sun on their faces. They had no definite object beyond an impulse to be alone, to live awhile in those peaceful solitudes, to fish or loaf or climb as the spirit moved them. But that eagerness of spirit which has sent men alike to the Poles and into equatorial jungles to look on the face of new lands touched them both. They spent a day setting their camp to rights after the fashion of the woodwise. Then they sought and found the trapper's blazed line. It led them by dim marks through dense thickets, across lowlands where cedars stood like brown columns supporting the sky itself, their feet planted in thick mosses and sunless shade, over fir-clad ridges where a west wind made a faint sighing among branches a hundred feet above their heads, and brought them at last out on the shore of the lake. The numerous lakes bordering close on the heavily wooded, mountainous coast of British Columbia have two characteristic features. They lie in granite pockets with steep-to, rocky shores. Or they spread in low basins shrouded in dense forest, and the margins of such lakes are a marshy jungle. In either case they are difficult of approach. One must clamber over jagged rocks, or work up through crabapple, devil's club, and sedgy grass. The Granite Pool on Valdez was one exception. This nameless lake proved another. Rod and Mary came to it through a heavy stand of cedar, massive old trees which had killed all the lesser growth in their centuries of possession. No sapling grew there, or bush or fern or vine. The level ground was carpeted with moss, which alone could thrive in that sunless place. Over this soft footing Rod and his wife walked by the little creek, flowing with faint murmurs in its bed of worn pebbles, till they stepped suddenly out of that semi-gloom into the brightness of open water rippling in the sun. A low, gravelly beach at their feet; wooded points jutting into the lake; an island lifting a green mound of trees a little distance offshore; the lake itself bending away out of sight behind the base of a great mountain five miles distant,--this they saw. "You never know what you're going to find back in these hills." Rod sat down on the gravel. "Let's sit and look. It's worth a look." "If we just had a boat up here," Mary observed, after a little.