It was writing these memoirs of his eventful life that furnished him pastime and I was employed in reading them, during the two months of our imprisonment in our snow bound cabin.
By the dim light of the window by day and the blaze of a pine log at night, he wrote upon the scraps of paper found about the cabin. As I now review the pile I find it made up of paper bags, margins of newspapers, fly leaves from a few old 23 books, and much of it on strips of a yellow window shade, also on the backs of fancy calendars with which Carson had adorned our cabin, and almost a whole chapter I find penciled finely on a pair of lady’s cuffs that were strangely out of place in a miner’s hut.
Buchan does not know that I am going to give his story to the public and I shall have to take chances and risk his displeasure. In that event I have the defence of pleading that no man has the right to withhold so good a tale from the world.
II.
IN DAYS OF INNOCENCE.
As I peer into the dim past that haunts the scenes of my childhood in Aberdeen, Scotland, a thousand memories troop by like the scenes of a panorama with the footlights turned low; and when I contemplate them in a meditative hour it leaves me with as lonesome a feeling as if I had listened to the old time song, “Home Sweet Home,” which I have heard a thousand times in distant climes, sometimes sung to crowded audiences at the opera, and again by the pioneer as he rattled his prairie schooner over the plains.
It is a song that never grows old and never will so long as men leave the home of their childhood, around whose hearthstones still play ghost-like, the recollections of bye-gone years, tenderly touching their sympathies as they pause for a moment in their monied pursuits in other lands.