I held was the wooden cross that Mathilde had given me, a weird
feeling passed through me, and there was an arrest of the passions
of mind and body; a coolness passed over all my nerves, and my brain
got clear again, the ring of fire loosing, melting away. It was a
happy, diverting influence, which gave the mind rest for a moment,
till the better spirit, the wiser feeling, had a chance to reassert
itself; but then it seemed to me almost supernatural.

One can laugh when misery and danger are over, and it would be
easy to turn this matter into ridicule, but from that hour to this
the wooden cross which turned the flood of my feelings then into a
saving channel has never left me. I keep it, not indeed for what it
was, but for what it did.

As I stood musing, there came to my mind suddenly the words of a
song which I had heard some voyageurs sing on the St. Lawrence,
as I sat on the cliff a hundred feet above them and watched them
drift down in the twilight:

"Brothers, we go to the Scarlet Hills:
(Little gold sun, come out of the dawn!)
There we will meet in the cedar groves;
(Shining white dew, come down!)
There is a bed where you sleep so sound,
The little good folk of the hills will guard,
Till the morning wakes and your love comes home.
(Fly away, heart, to the Scarlet Hills!)"

Something in the half-mystical, half-Arcadian spirit of the
words soothed me, lightened my thoughts, so that when, presently,