The Days of a Ma?i ^1903 



large as England and for the most part devoid of 

 roads. His good wife, however, told us of their tire- 

 less efforts in behalf of their varied charges. One 

 winter, for instance, a serious emergency of some sort 

 called the Bishop with a dog team to Hazelton, then 

 terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway, four hundred 

 miles distant and across trackless mountains. To 



An Mrs. Bompas I remarked that it would do the 



Anglican Communion good if its bishops could at 

 times change places. Her husband would no doubt 

 enjoy a season in Kent, and what a broadening of 

 vision would come to the Archbishop of Canterbury 

 if he could spend a few years in the Yukon diocese ! 



Having returned to the Albatross at Skagway, I 

 soon after departed for home, arriving in time to wel- 

 come Eric to this world on the 2yth of October- -the 

 vessel meanwhile proceeding with the others to Sitka, 

 Kodiak, and Prince William Sound, a region famous 

 for its volcanoes, glaciers, and gigantic Alpine heights. 

 As my two older boys had both turned to the pro- 

 fession of mining, I one day remarked to the Austrian 

 wife of a professor that I thought I should make a 

 poet of the baby. With perfect seriousness she then 



Poet blood inquired: f Und hat er vielleicht Poetenblut 1 auf der 



'"Poet blood" will out. Eric's first attempt, written at fifteen for the 

 Campanile, a high school paper, reads as follows: 



A CALL FROM THE OPEN SPACES 



A call from the open spaces, a call from the forests dim; 

 A call from the rushing rapids, from the partridge on the limb; 

 A call from the endless marshes, and the driving flocks of ducks; 

 A call from the great white waters, a challenge from antlered bucks. 



Sometime, somehow, it comes to us that vague, unreasoning want 

 The voice of life so long ago returns our lives to haunt: 

 A ghost of the time in the long ago when man hunted flesh for his life, 

 And fought and killed and ate and slept, and lived in the forest's strife. 



n 144 n 



