health, and abandoned the struggle, at a time when he believed himself on the threshold of a discovery that would make his fortune. The result proved that he was right. The metalliferous streak showed itself during their second day's diggings, and the four men staked out their claims along the edge of the stream, and then went back to Forty Mile Camp to record them.

XIV.

Walter Arden to Douglas Campbell.

Box 89, Post Office, Forty Mile Camp, on the Yukon River,
Dominion of Canada.

MY DEAR DOUGLAS,

Your friendly reply to my letter of the summer before last, despatched soon after our arrival at the Miner's Metropolis, came into my hands long after it was written, and at a period of preoccupation and trouble when I felt incapable of replying. I write now after a gap in time of nearly two years, and after an illness in which my life hung upon a thread for many dismal days and nights, when I had no knowledge of the passing hours, but lay like a log, watched and cared for by anxious friends, and with only one sense left me, the sense of pain, and an agonizing idea of the eternity of hours, sleepless hours, in which I lay on my back, with wide-open eyes staring at the rough timbers of a cabin roof, and peopling that rugged shelter with hideous creatures, the horrible inventions which go with a temperature of a hundred and five.

I have been on the edge of the abyss, Douglas, so near death that life and all it had ever given me of joy or woe melted into the distance of things half remembered, and I only knew, in a vague dim way, that once I had lived and rubbed shoulders with living men. Life was the dream, death the reality. An open grave was in the foreground of all those fever pictures. It was always there; and every now and then I could feel myself slipping down into it. The smell of the clay was always in my nostrils; the sound of the pick and the shovel was always in my ears. I could feel the four walls of the pit encompassing me, and the pit

grew deeper every day, and the faces of the friends looking over the edge had a far-away look. It may be that the labour with pick-axe and shovel in the rough shale and gravel by the river brink, which had been my daily task for so long, had made the odour and the sound of the earth a part of my sense of being, an experience so continuous and so vivid that the impression it had left upon my senses came between me and every other thought. I can only thus account for that ever-present idea of a grave; since in my conscious hours I had no dread of death, and had small cause to value my life, having missed the one blessing that would have made life dear.

Well, after passing through that fiery furnace of pain and delirium-the first caused by the stab of a knife that went perilously near my heart, the second the effect of what my devoted friend and doctor calls symptomatic fever-I am my own man again; my own man, with grey streaks in my hair and deeper lines on my forehead than I ought to have at eight and twenty; my own man, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling, as the result of less than two years' toil on a creek between the Yukon and the Klondyke, this sum representing a fourth share of the gold realized by the four partners in the little company of which Arthur Stormont is leader. One of the four partners has perished, and we hold his treasure in trust for his legal heirs; and, as we know absolutely nothing of his kindred, the business of arriving at a just disposal of his property may be arduous.

You must not think that this northern El Dorado offers a certainty of wealth for all comers. I could tell you of men who have toiled in the gold-region for years, summer and winter, worked out claim after claim, journeyed from creek to creek and river to river, followed every trail whereever there has been the promise of luck, and have gone on board the steamer for St. Michael with empty pockets and broken hearts. Others there are who, after a long series of failures, have stumbled upon a spot prolific in golden ore. Our case is exceptional, for we were lucky almost at the outset, and we owed our success to the intelligence of the man whose bones we are leaving in the Arctic wilderness, and whose fate was the climax in a horrible tragedy.

This letter which I have begun to-day will be long, for

it is to be a statement rather than a letter, a categorical narration of circumstances which are to me full of wonder and mystery. You are the only man to whom I would care to unfold that story, with all the dark fancies that have gone along with it in my own mind, for you are the only man from whom I should not expect ridicule or contempt. Of your indulgence and your sympathy I know myself secure.

My communication may occupy some days, for I am still too weak for any prolonged exertion, even so small an effort as letter-writing; and my chum and doctor is as watchful of my convalescence as he was of my illness, and won't allow me any liberties.

You have been told in my letter from San Francisco of the circumstances that led to my leaving England, and how the disappointment of a cherished dream sent me out into the wilderness. You know how small a factor the thirst for gold was in my scheme of life; and you will understand that the fortune that has fallen into my lap is like the pile of hundredfranc pieces in front of a wealthy idler at Monte Carlo, who puts down his stake on the trente et quarante table without caring a jot for the result.

I wrote very briefly, I know, of the fourth member of our little band-Michael Dartnell, familiarly Mike, a working man from the east end of London, a socialist in politics, and a man of shrewd intellect and tremendous physical power, a valuable associate in such an adventure as ours. It is chiefly of him I have to write in this record.

I resume my task after a night's rest, and the infinite blessing of a dreamless sleep.

The man Michael interested me deeply, and I had every reason to believe that he was honestly and warmly attached to me. He had a very strong feeling of the equal rights of men; and it was through me that he found himself for the first time living on equal terms with men born and reared in a social sphere above his own. I know that he greatly appreciated that privilege, and that even in our rough way of living he was able to perceive the differences of habits and manners, and to modify and refine his conduct in trifles. His fervour in the best kind of self-education needed no stimulus. The few books which he knew and

loved were the books that open the gates of the intellectual world. He enriched his mental treasury with those other books which we knew; and every day that we spent together brought him nearer to our level, and made him a better companion. He became less ponderous and dogmatic, learnt the touch and go of a lighter style of argument; and, as his reading widened, learnt to look at a question from more than one side. He interested me more than I can say, and I made him my friend. He had told me his life-tragedy; and after we had gone a long way on our pilgrimage, and when all my past life seemed to have receded into an infinite distance, I opened my heart to him and told him of my hopeless love for Rachel Lorimer. He knew her and worshipped her, as the bringer of light into dark places, and was able to understand and sympathize with my feelings as perhaps no one else could have done.

It would be difficult to convey to you what a tower of strength that man was to us, from the hour we left Juneau on the river steamer for Dyea, till the hour of our triumphant success, our allotments on a creek off the Klondyke river having yielded a harvest of gold rare in the history of placermining, when his health suddenly gave way, and the Hercules we had all admired as the embodiment of virile power became in a few short winter days weaker than a six-yearold child. The hands in which the woodman's axe or the miner's shovel had seemed light as a feather, lay on the coverlet, too feeble to hold a cup to the burning lips. It was only a common cold, he had declared a few days before, when we saw that he was not quite himself; but the common cold became congestion of the lungs, and all Mackenzie's efforts failed in arresting the evil.

I don't think any of our little band quite understood how much this man had been to us, till we saw him lying helpless in our rough cabin, with Alick Mackenzie sitting by his bed in a melancholy silence, and bending down every now and then, with the doctor's intent countenance, to listen to the labouring breath, or to wait with watch in hand for the last record of the clinical thermometer. Only then, perhaps, in those slow hours of gloomy foreboding, did we realize how much we owed to our low-born comrade, and how utterly all idea of caste or social difference had dropped