BUSINESS AND ROMANCE 317 



wind that whines through the naked tree tops, nor the howl of 

 the hungry wolf, for what had no terror for me in life need not 

 have afterward. And if the lessons that I learned at my 

 mother's knee be true; if there be that within me that hves on, 

 I am sure that it will be happier in its eternal home if it may look 

 back and know that the body which it had tried to guide 

 through its earthly career was having its long rest in the spot it 

 loved best." 



Did you ever meet a character hke that in northern fiction .►^ 

 No, of course not; how could you? . . . When the books 

 were written by city-dwelhng men. Then, too, is not any pro- 

 duction of the creative arts — a poem, a story, a play, a painting, 

 or a statue — but a reflection of the composer's soul.^ So . . . 

 when you read a book filled with inhuman characters, you have 

 taken the measure of the man who wrote it, you have seen a 

 reflection of the author's soul. Furthermore, when people 

 exclaim : ' ' What's the matter with the movies ^ ' ' The answer 

 is: Nothing . . . save that the screens too often reflect 

 the degenerate souls of the movie directors. 



But the Indian — how he has been slandered for centuries! 

 When in reahty it is just as Warren, the Historian of the 

 Ojibways, proclaimed: "There was consequently less theft 

 and lying, more devotion to the Great Spirit, more obedience 

 to their parents, and more chastity in man and woman, than 

 exists at the present day, since their baneful intercourse with 

 the white race." And Hearne, the northern traveUer, ended a 

 similar contention — ^more than a hundred years ago — by say- 

 ing: "It being well known that those who have the least inter- 

 course with white men are by far the happiest." 



That night, as I turned in, I had occasion to look through my 

 kit bag, and there I found, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, 

 the photograph — lent to me for six weeks — of the charming 

 Athabasca. Being alone in my tent, I carefully unfolded 

 its wrapper, and drawing the candle a httle nearer, I gazed 



