"I, General? Why I was born in it. My father was in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company as trapper. My mother brought me into the world on the shore of one of our magnificent Canadian lakes. My eyes first opened beneath the majestic verdant arcades of a virgin forest. The first horizon I gazed at was surrounded by chains of mountains whose haughty crest no human foot has yet trodden. Oh! General, how glorious it is to live in the desert without ties of any sort, to feel your heart beat freely in your bosom, to aspire through every pore the fragrant exhalations of the savannah. Alone with your horse, with no regrets for the past or care for the future, you feel that you live, and you unconsciously become a better man, because you are nearer to GOD whose sublime book ever lies open before you. Such an existence is the only true one, the only possible for a stout-hearted man; the other is only a continual slavery, an incessant restraint which withers ideas, dulls the intellect, and converts man such as GOD created him into a badly organized machine, a quarrelsome and wicked creature, who goes to his grave pale, sickly, and discontented." "By Jove! That is what I call enthusiasm, my boy," the general said, laughing. "Unfortunately, all this is only good in theory. What would become of civilization if everybody followed your example?" "Oh, yes," the hunter exclaimed, with a disdainful smile, "that's the great word, 'civilization'--that is to say, slavery; brutalization of the masses for the advantage of ambitious and insatiable minorities; an association of bandits decorated with pompous titles and sounding names, among whom strength represents the law, and who answer arguments by gaols, prisons, and bullets; where everything is paid for, life as well as death, and even the very vitiated atmosphere, breathed in muddy, narrow streets, and low, stifling houses. Deuce take civilization and the rogues who invented it for their own profit! Civilization is the plague and cause of all the diseases that afflict humanity. I'll have none of it." The general listened to the hunter with increasing surprise. The nervous blunt language involuntarily seduced him. It was the first time he found himself in the presence of one of those wood rangers who, impatient of control, have resolutely broken with the life of society. He could not understand this strange nature, so contrary to those he had hitherto elbowed in life.