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Moonlight nights are fairly restful for the bush trader, but when it is inky black, or pouring with rain, he has got to be very much out and about, and particularly vigilant has he got to be on tornado nights a most uncomfortable sort of weather to attend to business in, I assure you.

A red thread or two on a bush showed that he had torn his uniform in falling, and the young woods rover laughed. He could not recall another such gratifying night, one in which he had served his own people and also had annoyed the enemy beyond endurance. He went deep into the forest, hiding his trail as usual, and lay down in a covert to rest, while he ate some of the venison that he had left.

Hughes bucked the sternest game in the world and with it began a series of adventures that read like a romance and give a stirring background to the man's extraordinary public achievements. Hughes found out at once that all hope of earning a livelihood by teaching in the bush was out of the question. His money was gone: he had to exist, so he took the first job that came his way.

He had no such tree himself scarcely so much as a bramble bush; but, all the same, let the tinker take his pen in hand, and the pedigrees and genealogies of all his pilgrims are sure to be set forth as much as if they were to form the certificates that those pilgrims were to hand in at the gate. Feeble-mind, then, was of an old, a well-rooted and a wide-spread race.

He was pursued. The hounds had him out in the open. The only shelter for miles around was the sparse bush at the riverside, and the river itself. His interest became excitement, and a sudden wild hope. He now searched the horizon behind the man. There was not a soul in sight and yet those two shots. But the situation suddenly became critical for himself. He realized that the fugitive had seen him.

They took no companion with them. Dion carried a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use it. When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while. Such days were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world.

Heartily sick of the ocean, and longing once more for the bush, Israel, upon receiving his discharge at Nantucket at the end of the voyage, hied straight back for his mountain home. But if hopes of his sweetheart winged his returning flight, such hopes were not destined to be crowned with fruition. The dear, false girl was another's.

A story of old times. There was once a woman who travelled constantly through the woods. Every bush she saw she bit off, and from one of these she came to be with child. She grew bigger and bigger until at last she could travel no longer, but built a wigwam near the mouth of a stream. The woman gave birth to a child in the night.

The lad was sent by his father, an English settler, in company with two boys of his own age, the sons of neighbours, to be measured for a pair of shoes. George Desne, who followed the double occupation of farmer and shoemaker, lived about three miles from the clearing known as the English line. After the lads left their home, the road lay entirely through the bush.

Storri laughed, and a white flash of his teeth showed in a tigerish way. "Come!" cried Storri, smiting his hands in a kind of rapture of cruelty; "I will not, what you call it, beat about the bush. It is not Credit Magellan; it is not Northern Consolidated; no, it is not business at all. What! shall Storri be forever at some grind of business? Shall he never pause for love?