climbing over its walls and clinging to the mud-chinked crevices, where
I can hear the song of wild birds mingled with the sleepy hum of bees
moving from blossom to blossom about the doorway; where I can see the
timid red deer, as, peeping out of the brush, it hesitates between the
fear of man and the temptation of the white clover growing in front of
my home, and where I can watch the endless procession of waves
following each other up the bay. Give me the necessity of working for
my daily bread so that I will not feel as though I were a useless
cumbrance upon the earth; allow me an opportunity now and then of doing
a kindly act, even if it be no more than restoring to the shelter of
its mother's breast a fledgling that has fallen from its nest in a tree
top. If I may have these I will be happy, and happier still if I could
know that when the time comes for me to travel the trail, the sands of
which show no imprint of returning footsteps, that I might be put to
rest on the southern slope of the ridge beside my camp, where the
sunshine chases the shadows around the birch tree, where the murmur of
the waves comes in rhythm to the robin's song, and where the red deer
play on moonlight nights. Neither will I fear the snows of winter that
come drifting over the bay, driven by the wind that whines through the
naked tree tops, nor the howl of the hungry wolf, for what had no
terror for me in life need not have afterward. And if the lessons that
I learned at my mother's knee be true; if there be that within me that
lives on, I am sure that it will be happier in its eternal home if it
may look back and know that the body which it had tried to guide
through its earthly career was having its long rest in the spot it
loved best."

Did you ever meet a character like that in northern fiction?

No, of course not; how could you? . . . When the books were written by