LIFE AND LOVE RETURN 279 



ness; and my soul rested in supreme contentment. Yet the 

 ignorant city dwellers think of the wilderness as "God-for- 

 saken." Hunt the world over, and could one find any more 

 holy places than some of Nature's sanctuaries? I have found 

 many, but I shall recall but one, a certain grove on the Alaskan 

 border. 



It was in one of the wildest of all wild regions of the northern 

 world. "God-forsaken" . . . indeed? In truth, it seemed 

 to be the very home of God. There, between the bases of two 

 towering perpendicular ranges of mountains, mantled by end- 

 less snows and capped by eternal ice, lay the wildest of all 

 box-canons: one end of which was blocked by a barrier of snow 

 hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet thick the work 

 of countless avalanches; while the other end was blocked by a 

 barrier of eternal ice thousands of feet in width and millions 

 of tons in weight a living and growing glacier. And there, 

 away down at the very bottom of that wild gorge, beside a 

 roaring, leaping little river of seething foam, grew a beautiful 

 grove of trees; and never a time did I enter there but what I 

 thought of it as holy ground far more holy than any cathedral 

 I have ever known ... for there, in that grove, one seemed 

 to stand in the presence of God. 



There, in that grove, the great reddish-brown boles of Sitka 

 spruces four and five feet in diameter towered up like many 

 huge architectural columns as they supported the ruggedly 

 beamed and evergreen ceiling that domed far overhead. High 

 above an altar-like mass of rock, completely mantled with gor- 

 geously coloured mosses, an opening shone in the gray-green 

 wall, and through it filtered long slanting beams of sunlight, 

 as though coming through a leaded, sky-blue, stained-glass 

 window of some wonderful cathedral. While upon the grove's 

 mossy floor stood, row upon row, a mass of luxuriant ferns 

 that almost covered the velvet carpet, and seemed to form 

 endless seats in readiness for the coming of some congrega- 



