Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake time the previous evening. Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe slosh-sloshed against the beach. There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape. Just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee grounds. Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian Guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind. "Cutting your trip a bit short this year,--ain't you, Boss?" quizzed the Indian guide. Out from his muffling mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment. "Oh, I don't know," he answered with studied lightness. "There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little." "A woman, eh?" said the Indian Guide laconically. "A woman?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "A--woman? Oh, ye gods! No! It's wall paper!" Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing,--boisterously, hilariously like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him. The Senior Surgeon's laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a purely convulsive physical impulse. But the echo's laugh was a phantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness. Seven miles further down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian Guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two rocks,--paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian Guide lifted his voice high,--piercing, above the swirling roar of waters. "Eh, Boss!" shouted the Indian Guide. "I ain't never heard you laugh before!" Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long, strenuous hours that were left to them. The Indian Guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cow-shed. I don't know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out.