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- 



