An Auspicious Beginning and Suspicious Ending.
Let loose in the wilderness! How romantic, how inexpressibly delightful, that idea seems to some minds! Ay, even when the weight of years begins to stiffen the joints and slack the cords of life the memory of God’s great, wild, untrammelled, beautiful wilderness comes over the spirit like a refreshing dream and restores for a time something like the pulse of youth.
We sometimes think what a joy it would be if youth could pass through its blessings with the intelligent experience of age. And it may be that this is to be one of the joys of the future, when man, redeemed and delivered from sin by Jesus Christ, shall find that the memory of the sorrows, sufferings, weaknesses of the past shall add inconceivably to the joys of the present. It may be so. Judging from analogy it does not seem presumptuous to suppose and hope that it will be so.
“Sufficient unto the day,” however, is the joy thereof.
When the two canoes pushed off and swept rapidly over the fair bosom of Red River, the heart of Archie Sinclair bounded with a feeling of exultant joy which it would have been very hard indeed to convince him was capable of increase, while the bosom of his invalid brother was filled with a sort of calm serenity which constituted, in his opinion at the time being, a quite sufficient amount of felicity.
When we add that the other hunters were, in their several ways, pretty much in the same condition as the boys, we have said enough to justify the remark that their circumstances were inexpressibly delightful.
Proceeding some distance up stream they finally diverged into a minor tributary which led to waters that were swarming with water-fowl and other game.
“This is a grand burst, Little Bill,” said Archie, as he plied his paddle vigorously, and glanced over his shoulder at the invalid behind him.
“Prime!” answered Billie. “Isn’t it?” he added, with a backward glance at Okématan.
“Waugh!” replied the reticent savage.