A good many things might happen up there in the north, including snow-slides, floods and frost, or the downward rush of great trees in a _brulee_.

That was possibly why he commenced a little jingling song of the music-halls when they took the trail again, but the white grandeur of the great peaks silenced him, or his breath gave out as they floundered into fern-choked forest which was further garnished with the horrible devil's club.

Seaforth fell into a clump of it, and for several minutes his comments were venomous, for though he had been taught restraint in England and had further tuition in Canada of a grimmer description, little can be expected from the man who is gripped by that Satanic thorn.
It was half an hour before he went on again with his garments ensanguined as the result of Alton's treatment with the knife, and he gasped with relief when after a march of four miles, which occupied most of what was left of the day, they came out into the more open spaces of a big _brulee_.

Some time in the hot autumn a fire had passed that way, and the great trees towered above them, stripped and blackened columns, that seemed to stretch between earth and sky.

There was no limb left them, and they rose, majestic in their cylindrical symmetry, in apparently endless battalions, a vista of plutonic desolation.