Oh, idle prompting of the idle mind!
That dares not pierce the veil that shrouds our lot;
How shall the foolish swimmer hope to find
Pearl, if he diveth not?

From every side the voices call us now,
"Come up and help, for we are well-nigh spent;
The deeps are closing, and we know not how
The succour shall be sent.

"We yet are brothers, though the primal stain
Make labour seem a never-ending ill;
And through the shadows, sorrow more than gain,
Shall keep us brothers still.

"We ask for hearts tho' busied beating yet,
We ask for hands, yet warm, to bring us aid;
These are the gifts that busy souls forget,
These are the debts unpaid."

Surely our riches are not where we think,
And the kind thought is more than all our store,
Give me the children's laugh; the guinea's chink
Is failing more and more.

Therefore, oh God, I tread this City street,
With sadness that is not a foolish grief;
And from thine heavens I hear my message meet
"Take heart—I bring relief."

THE FREE TRAPPER.

WHEN I first visited the Pacific slope of
the Rocky Mountains, I was fortunate
enough every now and again to come
across some little link which connected me
with the past. It was a splendid region
into which I had wandered. Everywhere
it was patched with noble primeval forests,
varied with snowy peaks, and rapid rivers as
yet unnamed: a region long interesting to
the naturalist, as well as to the mere lover of
the stirring life of the fur trader. Was it
not in this region where that most veracious
of travellers Captain Lemuel Gulliver, of
London—  whilom of Laputa and Lilliput,
located the wondrous land of Brobdingnag,
and where the old Greek Pilot, Juan De
Fuca, was sent to fortify the strait which
bears his name, in case—vain thought!—
the English should pass from the Atlantic
to the Pacific? It was in this land that
Cook won some of his laurels, and that
John Vancouver grew famous. It was the
scene of Lewis and Clarke's famous adventures,
and is better known to the general
reader as the country which Washington
Irving invested with a most delightful
romantic interest through his Astoria, and
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
To me, the North-west had even a deeper
charm, for I visited it at a time, the like
of which can never come back. For years
I wandered over many of the wildest and
least known parts of the country, and was
fortunate enough, in the midst of many
misfortunes, to be the companion of some
of those who have helped to make its
history; and to mingle in many of its wildest
and most stirring enterprises. In Resolution Cove,
in Nootka Sound, where Cook
records that he laid his vessel up for repair,
I disinterred the bricks of the armourer's
forge, vitrified and fresh as if it had been
built but yesterday. The lordly Spanish
Dons who once held Nootka, had left their
traces in cannon balls and milled dollars,
occasionally dug up on the site of the old
fort; and the Indians still remembered by
tradition the story of their surrendering it
to Vancouver, and no historian could have
told it in quainter words: " The men
began to cultivate the ground and erect a
fort and stockade, when one day a ship
came with papers for the head man, who
was observed to cry, and all the white men
became sad. The next day they began
moving their goods to the vessel." The
grandson of old Moquilla, whose name
occupies so prominent a place in the
records of those stirring times, still ruled
Nootka, when with a solitary companion
I paid it a visit for the first time, after
he had murdered the crew of a trader, six
months before. This visit I am likely to
remember for some years to come, for it
yielded me the dismal satisfaction of hearing
a lively discussion on the (to me) rather
interesting question, whether it would not
be better for State policy to cut off the
heads of myself and friend, on the principle
that headless men are not apt to tell tales.
That the "ayes" were in the minority in
Moquilla's council, this record is the proof.
Vancouver's name they pronounced quite
distinctly, and I still found in Puget
Sound a last connecting link between his
day and ours, in the person of an old chief.
What thoughts must have been running
through the mind of that old man as he
glanced over the wonderful story of the
seventy years which had come and gone,
since John Vancouver sailed with his
stately ships up Puget Sound, I know not;
for the leathern countenances of the In-
dians, like dead men, tell no tales. The
medals that Lewis and Clarke distributed
among the Indians at the mouth of the
Columbia River, could still be sometimes
seen in the Chinook lodges, though that
tribe had long disappeared, with all the
Columbia and Willamette tribes, from their
old homes. Old Astoria voyagers I
sometimes came across. The son of that Pierre
Dorion, whose escape with his heroic Indian
mother, after the murder of his father, is so
graphically portrayed by Irving, was my
fellow-traveller for weeks together, before I
knew how historically interesting he was;