Six weeks Meleese
and John Cummins spent in an Indian camp at this point, and when at last
the two bade their primitive friends good-bye and left for home, the
little Indian children and the women followed their canoe along the edge
of a stream and flung handfuls of flowers after them.
Of what Meleese Cummins and her husband know of the great outside world,
or of what they do not know, it is wisest to leave unsaid. Details have
often marred a picture. They are children of the wilderness, born of that
wilderness, bred of it, and life of it--a beating and palpitating part of
a world which few can understand. I doubt if one or the other has ever
heard of a William Shakespeare or a Tennyson, for it has not been in my
mind or desire to ask; but they do know the human heart as it beats and
throbs in a land that is desolation and loneliness, where poetry runs not
in lines and meters, but in the bloom of the wild flower, the rush of the
rapid, the thunder of the waterfall and the murmuring of the wind in the
spruce tops; where drama exists not in the epic lines of literature, but
in the hunt cry of the wolf, the death dirges of the storms that wail
down from the Barrens, and in the strange cries that rise up out of the
silent forests, where for a half of each year life is that endless strife
that leaves behind only those whom we term the survival of the fittest.
THE CASE OF BEAUVAIS
Madness? Perhaps.
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