Cardigan had picked out the site. "If he died looking at that,
why, he just simply ought to die, Cardigan," he had laughed.

And now he was that poor specimen, looking out on the glory of the
world!

His vision took in the South and a part of the East and West, and
in all those directions there was no end of the forest. It was
like a vast, many-colored sea with uneven billows rising and
falling until the blue sky came down to meet them many miles away.
More than once his heart ached at the thought of the two thin ribs
of steel creeping up foot by foot and mile by mile from Edmonton,
a hundred and fifty miles away. It was, to him, a desecration, a
crime against Nature, the murder of his beloved wilderness. For in
his soul that wilderness had grown to be more than a thing of
spruce and cedar and balsam, of poplar and birch; more than a
great, unused world of river and lake and swamp. It was an
individual, a thing. His love for it was greater than his love for
man. It was his inarticulate God. It held him as no religion in
the world could have held him, and deeper and deeper it had drawn
him into the soul of itself, delivering up to him one by one its
guarded secrets and its mysteries, opening for him page by page
the book that was the greatest of all books. And it was the wonder
of it now, the fact that it was near him, about him, embracing
him, glowing for him in the sunshine, whispering to him in the
soft breath of the air, nodding and talking to him from the crest
of every ridge, that gave to him a strange happiness even in these
hours when he knew that he was dying.

And then his eyes fell nearer to the settlement which nestled