are open. They are drawn together by distance, if that sounds not absurd. They are all on the inside, and the rest of the world is outside. They are cozy, related, "one great big family."

"One great big family"—it is their expression, not mine, and it has become habitual on their lips. I had it from river-captains and hotelkeepers, from men of the Mounted Police and leery old beer-swiggers and alert waitresses. I did not hear it from the Indians, whose sense of humor differs. It seemed true to me as spontaneous things are true, one of those genial, up-flowing remarks that convey the nature of the speaker more accurately than the situation spoken of. "In here," a Yukoner, pausing between crisping damnations of some neighbor, would say, "we're just one great big family, you see." Irony, possibly; hypocrisy, no. I came to see that their blighting criticisms were inter-family privileges; let a stranger assail them and he was instructed where to go. A loyalty, a solidarity created by the conditions of their land, underlay their lives, and beneath pettiness was constant proof of a large and continual neighborliness. A community that can leave its doors open and that turns no needy ones away is entitled to its little inconsistencies. Long before we had reached Skagway and had topped the ramparts on the extraordinarily courageous railway I was sure that I was going to like the Yukoners, but it was not until I was finally inside that the novel career of coming to know them got under way.

27

Steel ends and navigation begins at White Horse, a village where men

live and watch the impudence of time with a smile; and it was at White Horse that I spent two weeks of utter happiness while the ice of Lake Laberge was deciding to go out. There was nothing to see no sights, I mean and nothing to do, which left an unusual amount of time for the gainful occupation of enjoying one's self. This took many forms. I strolled out to Baxter's fox farm and listened to tales of big game in the White River region: Mr. Baxter's business is amusing rich men; his recreation is telling about it. I sat on Frank Harbottle's porch and heard about the humors and difficulties of conveying mail to Dawson on a caterpillar. I visited the old coppermines with Corporal Cronkhite of the Mounted Police and his eight huskies, who were beautifully trained not to eat you, or even to begin. And I spent evenings in Captain Bruce's home, which resembled Stevenson's idea of heaven, a place where a man could have a little conversation. And when the mood to be alone came on me, I knew where to go.

Behind the village rose an ancient cut-bank which afforded an unfailingly satisfying view. The mountains stood back in widely separated ranges and were clothed with a soft and colorful atmosphere. Magnificence had quieted into beauty, and with the spruce-greens, granite-grays, and ice-blues, nature painted a landscape of exquisite repose. The eye took the imagination into a far country, a country of wide thoughts, soberly beautiful thoughts.

To escape these, the villagers sat all morning, all afternoon, and presumably all night, in the lobby of Charley Johnston's hotel. The chairs

were worn into comfort, and the air filled with tobacco-smoke, by a highly individual circle of sourdoughs, mostly of the importation of '98, who gathered about the stove. If that stove could talk, it could repeat all Yukon history, all Yukon customs, and offer more than sly allusions to all the Yukon romances past and present. During my fortnight I heard, while the talk smoldered from one sage to another, bits of all Yukon experience. I gathered facts about mining, about furs, and about the local adulteries. I listened to accounts of drinking-bouts, the eccentricities of women, and how to manage dogs. There were remarks on the outlook for tourists, the actions of tourists, the guilelessness, gullibility, and general godforsakenness of tourists; and there were prolonged talks on the weather. Occasionally some one would open the door into the world of magic beauty outside and say, "Damn the damn wind!"

Sometimes the hint of what I was missing would overcome my interest in these kindly, able, and inveterate gossips, and I would steal away to the White Horse Rapids and the company of the thirty thousand ghosts of '98. I liked to sit on a rock near where the whole river, converging, rushed into one wave, broke white, swept on into the next, and the next, and next, and slid away—a beautiful rapid, and one I should have walked around, in '98, like Swiftwater Bill. If I closed my eyes, I could see a procession never approached in any movie for drama, and could hear the shoutings of the treasure-seekers who followed the heel of the ice, that fabulous spring a generation ago, on the way to Dawson. What energy,

what tragic hopefulness, and what comic preoccupations come to pass there! In one spring they peopled the great valley of the Yukon with apparitions; and some, in meager flesh, can still be come on up quiet branches of the creeks.

The way to Dawson! Tahkeena, Hootalinqua, Little Salmon, Carmack's, Yukon Crossing, Selkirk, Stewart River-names that reach deep into the secret sensibilities of the exYukoner, for in their sound he hears an echo of the spell that held him. He forgets the years of imprecation, the summers of flies and the winters of frost; he remembers his desires. Even to myself, cheechako, those names bear a sentiment that stirs, an atmosphere of self-reliance and liberty, those familiars of the frontier. It was on an all-night trip, rowing from Stewart River to Dawson alone in a skiff, that I drank deepest from the cup of felicity which the Yukon holds to a man's lips.

The fame of Dawson is authentic. There she stands, with every other house untenanted, with warping sidewalks and cabins sagging on their natal ice, with death in her heart but a human cheeriness in her greeting that is immense, symbolic. She means more than do innumerable thriving towns with trolleys and statistics and chambers of commerce, complete, and all so wearily alike, for she has been somebody. Frayed of sleeve and gaunt of cheek, she wears the badge of Arctic Brotherhood on her breast, and it would be treason to give her away, to side with time and contradict the five hundred conspiring optimists who stick it out with her. For an instant she was great, great with the humors and

heartbreaks of human commonplace in a unique setting, and her fame is safe. Those who can visit Dawson and not be moved are the dead

ones.

To view her aright, I climbed Midnight Dome one sunny evening, and sat on a commanding perch through a few hours of perfect beauty. Below me lay the checker-board of the city on which strange games had been played; beyond ran the creeks Eldorado, Bonanza, Gold Bottom, Klondike, Dominion, Too Much Gold-whose possibilities would have upset the uncommercial serenity of the Sphinx. But peace had again closed in on these uneasy solitudes. Still farther on lay the trackless and mountainous forest; austere peaks raised pyramids of color in the midnight glow, while above all arched a sky still luminous with the day undying there so short a distance below the horizon. The gold commotion showed in its proper relation to the whole.

And now I come to the best of all, the up-river days. I had been active, and the laziness in me looked forward to those four days of watching the shores, from Dawson back to White Horse, of sleeping and eating and reading and talking and bathing in the perpetual sun. What rushing cannot do, sometimes hushing will; and it is in the fruitful slowness of upstream travel that a man can occasionally have, in addition to unfamiliar sights of things, those unfamiliar sights of self which awaken, disturb, incite and matter. Otherwise travel is a blind man's holiday, and the swiftness of travel but the toy of fools.

It was still before the tourist season, and the boatful represented the "great big family" in all its variety. Bishop Stringer with his pioneering wife was starting on a tour of his diocese as large as a side of the moon. Major Telford of the Mounted Police, a man compounded of all northern experiences and sympathies, lean and humorous and mellow, matched stories with all comers, mile for mile, and remained champion. A schoolteacher of Selkirk, who had never seen a train of cars, a crowd, or a tenstory building, was just returning from a flight with the aviators who had forwarded Amundsen's polar films. A mining magnate and his wife were scouring the region for pianos and bowling-alleys to take to Keno for the silver-diggers' pleasure. A poised intelligent half-breed discussed the latest perfections of the radio. Mushers, market-hunters, prospectors, were all there, and all instantly and sincerely friendly. The real significance of life was in that friendliness.

For the rest I am not a Baedeker. I could star beauties, identify routes, recommend-places such as Kluahne Lake, for instance-but not being a transportation company I do not care if only a few people take the trip to Dawson. I am this selfish, that I do not want the Yukon overrun before I run before I get back. For, to quote Mr. Service's best line, "I want to go back and I will."

"Well, sir," said one unwashed sourdough to me, "I rambled into this country in 1897, and I've been here ever since. One gets addicted to this country."

"Why?" I asked, regarding the unnecessary filth upon his person.

"Yes, sir, it's dirty work, dirty work," he countered, not wishing to tell me the truth. "At this work a man's got to wash 'most every day."

He was a priceless remnant, that wood-chopper who did not like to admit that he stayed because he could be free to be lazy. And it was later on that same day that I met a little French Canadian who gave me another clue. "Outside," he said, "you have to have de money at de ends of de fingers." Inside, one could imply, you were free from such restraints. Inside men will trust you, for they can keep tab on you. Inside there are lazy men and licentious men, but no bad men—they cannot survive there. Inside the conditions of existence are easy: learn to shoot, learn to cook, learn to avoid freezing to death, and two hundred thousand square miles of park-land is yours. By working yours. By working hard for six months, even for three, a man can loaf the rest; and the subtle

poison of this liberty enters his system rarely to be ousted. It is the land of reversion.

Nobody can ever say Yukon in my presence henceforth without starting a strange thrill around my body. The mischief has been done, the spell cast; and it was the Yukoners who cast it rather than the land they inhabit. I have been in greater wildernesses since. I have tasted life in the Mackenzie Valley, where the tradition is rivalry and social bitterness, and nothing could induce me to go there again. But the Yukon! It is a land to dream about; a land where the animals roam unterrified, where business is only skin-deep and beauty is the rest; a land where even the most hurried traveler needs only to stoop to pick up something rare. While there he begins to see how much of the routine of life is a mirage, a deception of shiny surfaces; and when he comes away, he comes thoughtful-eyed and richer.

T

O THE majority of people the idea of a woman in the White House is still unthinkable. And yet, since women have successfully aspired to honors as high in the political scale as the United States Senate, and since, politically speaking, they are not in a state of arrested development, it is not unreasonable to assume that a woman presidential woman presidential candidate is at least within the range of possibility. Not that such a candidate would set a precedent. It has been about half a century since the nomination of Mrs. Belva Lockwood for the presidency of the United States sent a slight ripple of amusement over the country. A little later the Equal Rights party nominated Mrs. Victoria Claffin Woodhull Martin for the same high office, but this incident was taken even less seriously.

That was back in the unsafe seventies, those years when democracy was not yet safe for women workers or women voters or women office-holders. It is true that some of the barriers to woman's progress had already begun to give way. A few women had been employed by the government to copy land-warrants, the work being sent to their homes. In the Treasury Department a wife had been permitted to

work in the place of her husband who was ill, but although she was allowed to keep the position after his death because of her efficiency, she had to work under her brother's About that time a high official of the government said: "A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper. I want to employ women to cut treasury notes." The movement of women toward economic freedom having been thus accelerated by the wisdom of Providence augmented by the thriftiness of man, there is no telling how rapid progress might have been except for feminine frailty made evident when the tea-pot invaded every window-ledge in the Treasury Department. This, according to the political philosophers of the day, was proof that women were unfit for government service, though the corridors were blue from the smoke of cigars with which, at the noon-hour, men workers stimulated and refreshed themselves.

Yes, Belva Lockwood and Victoria Claffin Woodhull Martin lived in those good old days when woman's right to overwork and to be overworked remained untouched by legislative interference. According to the statistics of the seventies there were in Boston alone eight thousand