through the moonlight--another flash like a thin beam of light--the fish was transfixed in mid-air by the Indian spear! They saw it all. The scene was brought before their eyes. They sat breathless around the supper table. And yet the man who had this magic of voice and eye had never once raised that voice of his--had never once made a gesture except by the uplifting of his finger. “Fishing--that is fishing!” said Hal Holmes. “I should like----” The finger was upraised in front of him. “You must not so much as think of it, my friend! It would be called poaching on our rivers here,” said Mr. Wesley with a smile. “Then I should like to live in the land where the fish of the rivers, the deer of the forests, the birds of the air are free, as it was intended they should be--free to all men who had skill and craft--I have heard of the trappers,” said Hal. “It seems no sort of life for a wholesome man to live--pulling the string of a bellows, hammering iron into shoes, for plough-horses!--no life whatsoever.” Wesley smiled. “Ah, if you but knew aught of the terror of the backwoods,” said he. “If you but knew of it--one vast terror--monstrous--incredible. A terror by day and by night. I was used to stand on one of the hills hard by our little settlement, and look out upon the woods whose skirts I could see in the far distance, and think of their immensity and their mystery. Hundreds of miles you might travel through those trackless forests until the hundreds grew into thousands--at last you would come upon-the prairie--hundred and hundreds of miles of savage country--a mighty ocean rolling on to the foot of the Rocky Mountains! Between the backwoods-and the mountains roll the Mississippi River--the Ohio, the Potomac. Would you know what the Mississippi is like? Take the Thames and the Severn and the Wye and the Tyne and the Humber--let them roll their combined volume down the one river bed; the result would be no more than an insignificant tributary of the Mother of Waters--the meaning of the name Mississippi.” There was more breathlessness. When Hal Holmes broke the silence everyone was startled--everyone stared at him. “Grand! grand!” he said in a whisper. “And your eyes beheld that wonder of waters, sir?” Mr. Wesley held up both his hands.