Conjuror's House

The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back crouched a dozen cleanwhitewashed buildings. Before her in interminable journey, day after day, league on leagueinto remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailingship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, todrop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe mannedby a dozen paddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abítibi. Once a year a littleband of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across the ice from someunseen wilderness trail. That was all.