of the forest, and his gaze came to rest on the more impressive habitation of Sam Carr.

"Dat's white man married hon Enjun woman," Breyette responded to Thompson's inquiry. "Ah don' never see heem maself. Lachlan she's leev over there."

Left to himself Thompson would probably have gravitated first to a man of his own blood, even though he had been warned to approach Carr with diplomacy. But there was no sign of life about the Carr place, and his men were headed straight for their objective, walking hurriedly to get away from the hungry swarms of mosquitoes that rose out of the grass. Thompson followed them. Two weeks in their company, with a steadily growing consciousness of his dependence upon them, had inclined him to follow their lead.

They found Lachlan at home, a middle-aged Scotch half-breed with a house full of sons and daughters ranging from the age of four to twenty. How could they all be housed in three small rooms was almost the first dubious query which presented itself to Thompson. His mind, to his great perplexity, seemed to turn more upon incongruities than upon his real mission there. That is, to Thompson they seemed incongruities. The little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him with a force he could not understand. He could not, for instance, tell why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his attention focussing sharply upon the people, their manner of speech, their surroundings, even upon so minor a detail as a smudge of flour upon the hand that Mrs. Lachlan extended to him. She was a fat, dusky-skinned woman, apparently regarding Thompson with a feeling akin to awe. The entire family, which numbered at least nine souls, spoke in the broad dialect of their paternal ancestors from the heather country overseas.

Thompson spent an hour there, an hour which was far from conducive to a cheerful survey of the field wherein his spiritual labors would lie. Aside from Sam Carr, who appeared to be looked upon as the Nestor of the village, the Lachlans were the only persons who either spoke or understood a word of English. And Thompson found himself more or less tongue-tied with them, unable to find any common ground of intercourse. They were wholly illiterate. As a natural consequence the world beyond the Athabasca region was as much of an unknown quantity to them as the North had been to Thompson before he set foot in it—as much of its needs and customs were yet, for that matter. The Lachlan virtues of simplicity and kindliness were overcast by obvious dirt and a general slackness. In so far as religion went if they were—as Breyette had stated—fond of preachers, it was manifestly because they looked upon a preacher as a very superior sort of person, and not because of his gospel message.

For when Mrs. Lachlan hospitably brewed a cup of tea and Thompson took the opportunity of making his customary prayer before food an appeal for divine essence to be showered upon these poor sinful creatures of earth, the Lachlan family rose from its several knees with an air of some embarrassing matter well past. And they hastened to converse volubly upon the weather and the mosquitoes and Sam Carr's garden and a new canoe that Lachlan's boys were building, and such homely interests. As to church and service they were utterly dumb, patently unable to follow Thompson's drift when he spoke of those things. If they had souls that required salvation they were blissfully unconscious of the fact.

But they urged him to come again, when he rose to leave. They seemed to regard him as a very great man, whose presence among them was an honor, even if his purposes were but dimly apprehended.

The three walked back across the meadow, Breyette and MacDonald chattering lightly, Thompson rather preoccupied. It was turning out so different from what he had fondly imagined it would be. He had envisaged a mode of living and a manner of people, a fertile field for his labors, which he began to perceive resentfully could never have existed save in his imagination. He had been full of the impression, and the advice and information bestowed upon him by the Board of Missions had served to heighten the impression, that in Lone Moose he would fill a crying want. And he was not so obtuse as to fail of perceiving that no want of him or his message existed. It was discouraging to know that he must strive mightily to awaken a sense of need before he could begin to fulfill his appointed function of showing these people how to satisfy that need.

Apart from these spiritual perplexities he found himself troubled over practical matters. His creed of blind trust in Providence did not seem so sound and true. He found himself dreading the hour when his swarthy guides would leave him to his lonely quarters. He beheld terrible vistas of loneliness, a state of feeling to which he had always been a stranger. He foresaw a series of vain struggles over that rusty cookstove. It did him no good to recall that he had been told in the beginning that he would occupy the mission quarters, that he must provide himself with ample supplies of food, that he might have to prepare that food himself.

His mind had simply been unable to envisage the sordid reality of these things until he faced them. Now that he did face them they seemed more terrible than they really were.

Lying wakeful on his bed that night, listening to the snoring of the half-breeds on the floor, to the faint murmur of a wind that stirred the drooping boughs of the spruce, he reviewed his enthusiasms and his tenuous plans—and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon so slender a foundation as this appointment to a mission in the outlying places. He blamed the Board of Missions. Obviously that august circle of middle-aged and worthy gentlemen were sadly ignorant of the North.

Whereupon, recognizing the trend of his thought, the Reverend Wesley Thompson turned upon himself with a bitter accusation of self-seeking, and besought earnestly the gift of an humble spirit from Above.

But the deadly pin-points of discontent and discouragement were still pricking him when he fell asleep.