meet us. That spiritual face-such a face as you might see among the preachers of Westminster or Oxford-and the little shy Indian girl-wife and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not to the Cambridge paternity. What was the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy -I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.

I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school where he taught he had met his Fate-the thing he probably scouted that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer encampments, where white vices have not pol

luted the very air. He fell in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white sots, who ever seek hiding in the far wilderness. He married her, and had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took a position with The Company and lived no doubt in such happiness as only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease which gave her such unearthly beauty, ripened. She died. What was to become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's daughter- the little half-breed girl-and chained himself to his rock of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he lives today. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer, only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery island 200 miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come to the Ridge, or the In

dian agent arrives with the treaty money once a year.

And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written?"

"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong men set forth to traverse lone places with no defence but their own valiant spirit.

Space permits only one more example, and it is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul-Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties; and he was serving The Company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia-a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He had been sent with a party to bring some furs across from MacLeod Lake east in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid winter. Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back, travel proved very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail; and travel aside plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss cross tangle of underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.

He set off without horse or gun and only a lump of tallow in his pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran on winged feetfeet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail

-you are hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring big whiteman-fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at first streak of dawn ran on and on and on.

By the second night, Hall had eaten. all his tallow. He had also reefed in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he ran. And the snow drifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward. Of course, he was not dizzy. It was the snow blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he would have let himself, he would have dug down a sleeping hole in the snow and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had become weighted with lead.

He knew it was all up with him when he fell. He knew if he could get only a half hour's sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on. Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have taken the half hour's sleep; and another half hour's; and have never wakened. Anyway, something wakened Hall. He heard the crackle of a branch. That was nothing. Branches break to every storm; but this was like branches breaking under a moccasin. It was unbelievable; there was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire, surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.

With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment. Then a tingling went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to life-blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his pres

W

ITHIN the past two years another and a greater triumph of scientific horticulture has arrived; another natural enemy of the things that grow and bring forth. fruit has been vanquished. Jack Frost, long King of the Fruit Crop, has been dethroned. Fruit growers have literally built millions of fires under him, and burned him out.

Scientific orchard heating has made it possible to raise the temperature of a two hundred acre orchard ten to fifteen degrees with as much certainty as the

janitor can heat the city man's flat. It takes somewhat more labor than the last mentioned process, but the satisfaction. and the profits of "heating all outdoors" are surpassingly greater. Frost insurance for the fruit crop is now just as practicable, just as certain, and vastly more profitable for the money expended than either fire or life insurance.

Insurance by fire for the fruit grower makes vastly greater profits at a much smaller expense than insurance against fire does for the merchant or manufacturer. The little outdoor oil stoves and coal furnaces that have been sold by the

WHAT CREATE THE "TROPICS."

From left to right, row one: 1. graduated burner type of oil heater; 2, single burner type of oil heater, with center draft; 3. reservoir heater that may be set to burn any desired length of time. Row two: 1. the original California oil heater that started orchard heating; 2, an orchard coal heater; 3. pan type of reservoir heater, the size of the flame being regulated by closing the holes.

millions to orchard owners in the last year and a half have banished from the fruit grower that annual early spring nervous prostration from fear of frost; that periodic, paralyzing fear that he may go to bed at night and awaken to find his whole year's labor chilled to death by a sudden frost. The cumulative despair of losing three or four fruit crops in succession that has put fruit growers out of business and made them dependent on charity or day labor is past. An orchard with a reasonably industrious and provident owner can be made to yield an average crop every season so far as the frost is concerned. Scientific frost fighting with fire is as much a fact as seed testing, irrigation, fertilizing, spraying or pruning. It is the last and greatest advance in systematic horticulture, and has placed the fruit grower abreast of the scientific farmer.

Since the beginning of commercial horticulture, the fruit grower has been at the mercy of the elements. He made

all his calculations, all his plans, and all his business arrangements contingent on the hope that the frost would miss him. And before the development of orchard heating the chances against him were getting worse and worse in the frost belt. In the modern commercial orchard, the land, machinery, labor, spraying equipment and cultivation total as heavy an investment as many manufacturing enterprises. And when two or three crops in succession were wiped out by frost, the average grower was completely bankrupt.

It was in the nature of a revelation when in 1908 some experimenting growers in Colorado began what was characterized as a theoretical attempt to heat all out-doors. There was much jesting and skepticism about the ridiculous idea of warming up a whole orchard with little fire-pots, but the experimenters were not to be discouraged. The frost came, one of the worst in the history of the state, and the only crops produced were those on the small experimental areas that had been heated. There was an immediate rush to get on the "smudging wagon." All through the West, in Oregon, California, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, and Florida, heaters are being shipped as fast as they can be manufactured. Frost fighting has been developed into a genuine insurance. Heating a large part of the outdoors of a