jerked their heads hurriedly to the south. A golden rim peeped over the mountain's snowy shoulder, smiled upon them an instant, then dipped from sight again.

There were tears in their eyes as they sought each other. A strange softening came over them. They felt irresistibly drawn toward each other. The sun was coming back again. It would be with them to-morrow, and the next day, and the next. And it would stay longer every visit, and a time would come when it would ride their heaven day and night, never once dropping below the sky-line. There would be no night. The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow and the forests answer; the land Iwould bathe in the blessed sunshine and renew life. Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey back to the Southland. They lurched blindly forward, and their hands met,-their poor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath their mittens.

But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled. The Northland is the Northland, and men work out their souls by strange rules, which other men, who have not journeyed into a far country, cannot come to understand.

An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and fell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet when he got back. Home did not seem so very far away now. Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache. Of a sudden, he raised a whirlwind of blasphemy, which in turn ceased with startling abruptness. The other man had robbed his sugar-sack. Still, things might have happened differently, had not the two dead men come out from under the stones and hushed the hot words in his throat. They led him quite gently from the cache, which he forgot to close. That consummation was reached; that something they had whispered to him in his dreams was about to happen. They guided him gently, very gently, to the wood-pile, where they put the ax in his hands. Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt sure they shut it after him,-at least he had heard it slam and the latch fall sharply into place. And he knew they were wait

ing just without, waiting for him to do. his task.

"Carter! I say, Carter!"

Percy Cuthfert was frightened at the look on the clerk's face, and he made haste to put the table between them.

Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm. There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the patient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goes about it methodically.

"I say, what's the matter?"

The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, but never opening his mouth.

"I say, Carter, I say; let's talk. There's a good chap."

The master of arts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillful flank movement on the bed where his Smith & Wesson lay. Keeping his eyes on the madman, he rolled backward on the bunk, at the same time clutching the pistol. "Carter!"

The powder flashed full in Weatherbee's face, but he swung his weapon and leaped forward. The ax bit deeply at the base of the spine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness of his lower limbs leave him. Then the clerk fell heavily upon him, clutching him by the throat with feeble fingers. The sharp bite of the ax had caused Cuthfert to drop the pistol, and as his lungs panted for release, he fumbled aimlessly for it among the blankets. Then he remembered. He slid a hand up the clerk's belt to the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other in that last clinch.

Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion of his body was useless. The inert weight of Weatherbee crushed him,—crushed him and pinned him there like a bear under a trap. The cabin became filled with a familiar odor, and he knew the bread to be burning. Yet what did it matter? He would never need it. And there were all of six cupfuls of sugar in the cache,-if he had foreseen this he would not have been so saving the last several days. Would the windvane ever move? It might even be veering now. Why not? Had he not seen the sun to-day? He would go and see.

No; it was was impossible to move. had not thought the clerk so heavy a man. How quickly the cabin cooled! The fire must be out. The cold was forcing in. It must be below zero already, and the ice creeping up the inside of the door. He could not see it, but his past experience enabled him to gauge its progress by the cabin's temperature. The lower hinge must be white ere now. Would the tale of this ever reach the world? How would his friends take it? They would read it over their coffee, most likely, and talk it over at the clubs. He could see them very clearly. "Poor Old Cuthfert," they murmured; not such a bad sort of a chap, after all." He smiled at their eulogies, and passed on in search of a Turkish bath. It was the same old crowd upon the streets. Strange, they did not notice his moosehide moccasins and tattered German socks! He would take a cab. And after the bath a shave would not be bad. No; he would eat first. Steak, and potatoes, and green things, how fresh it all was! And what was that? Squares of honey, streaming liquid amber! But why did they bring

Hark! The wind-vane must be surely spinning. No; a mere singing in his ears. That was all, a mere singing. The ice must have passed the latch by now. More likely the upper hinge was covered. Between the moss-chinked roof-poles, little points of frost began to appear. How slowly they grew! No; not so slowly. There was a new one, and there another. Two-three-four; they were coming too fast to count. There were two growing together. And there, a third had joined them. Why, there were no more spots. They had run together and formed a sheet.

Well, he would have company. If Gabriel ever broke the silence of the North, they would stand together, hand in hand, before the great White Throne. And God would judge them, God would judge them! Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.

N

ATURALISTS nowadays use the photographic camera in their work quite as frequently, and fully as effectively, as do the members of any one of the other learned professions. In obtaining the pictures of living animals wherewith to illustrate zoological treatises of various kinds, this instrument is now rapidly superseding the old methods of obtaining such subjects by the use of brush and pencil. Beautiful half-tone pictures of living wild animals of every description, taken in captivity, as well as in their natural haunts, are now frequently met with, both in scientific works, and popular articles devoted to their history. Formerly, for a zoölogical artist to produce a small uncolored picture of a bird, for example, it frequently took a day or two, and then after this it had to be engraved if intended to figure in a book. Such productions, always attended with considerable expense, were at the best more or less inaccurate, unsatisfactory, and worse than all, often unnatural. Photography, as has just been stated, is rapidly revolutionizing all this, and although it may never entirely supplant the graphic art, it will surely far outstrip it in the race, as a means to meet pictorial ends.

During the last few years naturalists who have become skilled in the use of the camera have, among vertebrate forms, succeeded best with mammals, then with reptiles, while birds are far more difficult; and it is the rarest thing of all to meet with any good photographs of living fish. It is of this last-named class of subjects that I desire to say a few words.

My first experiences in the photography of living fish occurred at the aquaria of the United States Fish Commission at Washington, the facilities for doing so having been extended to me by the United states Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, Captain J. J. Bryce. It had been tried by others there upon numerous other occasions, but nothing worthy of the name of success had ever been accomplished. This was principally due to the great difficulty in handling the light; of overcoming the

reflections in the various aquaria in the Marine Grotto " where they are upon exhibition; to the fact that the front side of any one of the tanks is alone composed of glass, through which the fish must be taken; and finally, to the great restlessness of many of the fishes themselves.

It at once became apparent to me, that the only hope of obtaining good results lay in using a tripod camera, with the very quickest plate obtainable, and by instantaneous exposures.

Then came the matter of focusing sharp on the moving subjects. After the tripod and camera had been set in front of the aquarium, and the light most carefully studied, this was met by focusing on the inner surface of the glass, then cautiously carrying the focal distance to a point in the water beyond it. So that, when a fish in the aquarium swam close by the inner surface of the glass opposite the center of my lens, it might be photographed by an instantaneous exposure. This was tried

many times with varying success, the best pictures secured being those wherein the subjects were moving, or swimming, with the least rapidity. Some fishes poise themselves in the water, in such a manner as to be almost immovable in the element, as, for example, in the case of the common pike (Esox lucius),—and with but little trouble I secured a fine picture in the case of one of this species. Then some of the sunfish (Lepomis) offered fairly good subjects, and in one trial a good result was attained, in which twenty fish appeared upon the same negative, all sharp and clear, and exhibiting no movement whatever. These were the common form (L. gibbosus), so well known to the young fishermen of our ponds and streams.

On another day, when I had the "Grotto" all to myself, and the light as good as it could be in such a place, I was engaged for over two hours in my attempts to secure a "snap" upon a small male long-eared sunfish (L. auritus) that kept constantly swimming round and round his large aquarium. It seemed he never would come opposite my lens, and close to

F

IFTEEN miles east of the Round

Valley Indian Reservation, Mendocino County, California, in an old willow wigwam, lives Lolita Lavegne, or Lily Lavegne, as she is more commonly known. She is not the Lolita of former days, and to look upon her as she sits basking in the sun near the root of some oak, or plods slowly and feebly along the mountain trails, no one would ever guess that she is, or had ever been, anything other than just a common Digger Indian woman, without a higher desire than to secure the simplest necessities of life. But her life has been much more than common, and her singular career and romantic past would put to shame the most fanciful air-castles of her white sisters.

Lolita's failings, if that is the name by which they should be called, were inherited from parents who were naturally vicious. Her father was a Frenchman who had gone among the Yokio Indians while a very young man, and had adopted, in a great measure, the ways of this native people. He was of a very quarrelsome and morose disposition, and whenever the opportunity offered would abuse and whip. the Indians. Being a powerful, muscular man, he seldom met with resistance; and through continual threats and menaces he acquired a following among certain young men of the tribe, who were often accomplices in his inhumane acts. Several wives and many children composed his household, and excepting one, all the wives he treated with the utmost cruelty. This exception was a pretty young woman, whom Lavegne had received in marriage from an old chief of a tribe who sought to secure the Frenchman's friendship by making him a present of the daughter. She was decidedly handsome, and her fair skin gave evidence that the blood which flowed in her veins was not altogether from the dark race. Her father, the chief, was a man of more than ordinary executive. ability for an Indian; hence his control. of the tribe with which he lived. He also

was a man of very cruel nature, and not a few of his own people had died at his hands. By uniting his family with that of Lavegne, he gained control of all the tribes within ten signal-fires. After a year of married life, Lavegne's girl-wife presented him with a daughter, and with the usual ceremonies of the tribe, the baby was christened Lolita.

The pretty child grew, as the years passed by, into charming maidenhood. Suitors for her hand were plentiful, even at this early period, and with her courtship days began the dark mysteries that surrounded her life.

One of Lolita's first suitors was Moran, the son of a chief, who was at the head of a tribe, whose hunting-ground was near that of the Yokios. The young couple often met at the fandangos, and would stroll away into some shadowed part of the sweat-house, and there make love-vows such as only fond hearts can.

One morning, the startling news was brought to the Yokio rancheria that this young man, the sweetheart of Lolita, was found lying dead in the brush close to the main trail leading from Yokio to Laketa. His own tribe was notified by runners, and upon investigation it was found that the young lover had been stabbed to the heart with a dagger. Seemingly, he had not moved after the fatal blow had been struck.

An investigation, as rude and brief in its nature as the minds of the people who held it, followed. Lolita was there and told how she had seen him on the fatal night, and had accompanied him for some distance from the camp when he started home. She seemed almost heartbroken over the affair,-and weeping and wailing, she declared that the death of her sweetheart should be avenged.

"I believe," she said, "that this is the work of some jealous rival."

Some efforts were made to find the perpetrator of the crime; but as Lolita was known to have many admirers, it could