We had a wonderful walk along the Flat Top, which was a prolonged mountain meadow full of flowers. Vachel began to repine because he foresaw that, like everything else, our tramp must end, and that in a few weeks we should be back in Springfield and the mere town. I told him a story of how one summer day in Petrograd I paused at a fruiterer’s shop to buy some strawberries which looked very inviting. They were very dear, but the shopkeeper said, “I have some very good second quality strawberries inside the shop, and I strongly recommend them.” “Thanks,” said I. “But I never buy second quality strawberries.” “So in life, eh Vachel, let us never accept second quality strawberries.” The poet laughed, and began talking of grades of eggs, new-laid eggs, State eggs, selected eggs, political eggs. So walking gently we reached the north-western extremity of the tableland and came upon a grandiose diversified scene of shadows and gloomy greens and barren scarps, and of crowned monarchs of ice and snow. The pines of the Canadian approach were posted like companies of soldiers and disposed in beleaguering armies as if the line, unguarded by men, was guarded by trees, the forest wardens of the Empire and the Republic. The poet saw in the scene another Turner engraving. We plunged then downward through thick masses of alder and hazel, a whole mountain-side solid with low growth. Here also were thousands of raspberry bushes all agleam with rosy fruits. Vachel called the descent a “raspberry epic.” Down, down we plunged to the dark valley of the rushing Kootenai, only finding a camping-ground after dark. We came to an aged river in a steep vale of years with old shaggy firs on its very water-edge, and with the ruins of the uncontrollable ever-encroaching forest piled up like walls. We lighted a fire on a humpy-bumpy bit of shore where it was hard either to walk or sit, but easy to find wood to burn. We each cleared ourselves a cradle in the brown needles of the infringing firs. It was a magnificent enclosure which the old river was a-running through, like a cypress-walled garden of an Asiatic mountain-castle. The trees stood like gigantic janissaries or guardsmen with their cloaks on. The night-stars were exalted by the climbing forest and peeped but faintly into the depths, and like a mighty black bastion the sheer rock of the mountain cut off the view northward. The fire flared, the hot stones cracked and burst. We put our hot blankets around us and sprawled on them whilst the poet cooked the ham and the beans, and I tended the coffee-pot or stripped the last wisps of grease-paper from the butter. We slept in our cradles and wakened in the morning to see the beavers jumping among the fallen timber and diving in the river. [Illustration]