Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The New North by Agnes Deans Cameron
page 35 of 324 (10%)
Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.

The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and
run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
Circle.

[Illustration: Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta]

The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven
times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates
of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace
whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.

[Illustration: A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge]

At noon it clears, and as we "make tea" at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
Sepee of the Indians), the first of the "stopping-places" or
Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple _dodecatheon_. As we pass Lily
Lake he remarks, "This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
DigitalOcean Referral Badge