flowers—­a reeking, stinking country of brimstone, a hell.  In your Blue Books you have called it the Sulphur Country.  And this country, as you draw a line from Christie Bay to Old Fort Reliance, is straight between.  Mon pere was dying, and my time was short.  I decided to venture it—­cut across that Sulphur Country, and I sought for a man to accompany me.  I could find none.  To the Indian it was the land of Wetikoo—­the Devil Country; to the Breeds it was filled with horror.  Forty miles distant there was a man I knew would go, a white man.  But to reach him would lose me three days, and I was about to set out alone when the stranger came.  He was, indeed, a strange man.  When he came to what I called my chateau, from nowhere, going nowhere, I hardly knew whether to call him young or old.  But I made my guess.  That terrib le winter had branded him.  When I asked him his name, he said: 

“I am a wanderer, and in wandering I have lost my name.  Call me M’sieu.”

I found this was a long speech for him, that his tongue was tied by a horrible silence.  When I told him where I was going, and described the country I was going through, and that I wanted a man, he merely nodded that he would accompany me.

We started in a canoe, and I placed him ahead of me so that I could make out, if I could, something of what he was.  His hair was dark.  His beard was dark.  His eyes were sunken but strangely clear.  They puzzled me.  They were always questing.  Always seeking.  And always expecting, it seemed to me.  A man of unfathomable mystery, of unutterable tragedy, of a silence that was almost inhuman.  Was he mad?  I ask you, gentlemen—­was he mad?  And I leave the answer to you.  To me he was good.  When I told him what mon pere had been to me, and that I wanted to reach him before he died, he spoke no word of hope or sympathy—­but worked until his muscles cracked.  We ate together, we drank together, we slept side by side—­and it was like eating and drinking and sleeping with a sphinx which some strange miracle had endowed with life.

The second day we entered the Sulphur Country.  The stink of it was in our nostrils that second night we camped.  The moon rose, and we saw it as if through the fumes of a yellow smoke.  Far behind us we heard a wolf howl, and it was the last sound of life.  With the dawn we went on.  We passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose the sulphurous fogs.  In many places the water we touched with our hands was hot; in other places the forests we paddled through were so dense they were almost tropical.  And lifeless.  Still, with the stillness of death for thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years.  The food we ate seemed saturated with the vileness of sulphur; it seeped into our water-bags; it turned us to the color of saffron; it was terrible, frightening, inconceivable.  And still we went on by compass, and M’sieu showed no fear—­even less, gentlemen, than did I.