odor of hot fudge. He is outside the iron gates now, leaping and barking, every muscle in his body vibrating, from the tip of his nose to the tip of his bushy tail.

Sexton Miller stands beside the dog and looks keenly into the vestibule. There is nothing but darkness, and some stray fragments of the night wind which has darted in to play. Sexton Miller is quite sure that he has locked the big bronze doors, but he may as well see.

He opens the gate, he clomps across the vestibule, he turns the knob, and the door swings; swings wide to the sight of thirteen laughing young faces clustered around the blue flame of a chafing-dish! They are making more fudge; and Jiggs is in after it before they are even aware of the sexton.

This is a terrible moment! There are shrieks of terror, sobs of remorse, wails for mercy! Disclosure, expulsion, and disgrace confront each and every one of the guilty fudge-makers! Unlucky little Dorothea Marsh faints; but dimpled Roxana Forester comes straight up to the sexton with a world of irresistible pleading in her deep blue eyes.

"Oh, please, Mr. Miller, you won't report us to Old Sn- Miss Nellie!" she begs.

Sexton Miller blinks at her. His lumpy face looks as if it has weathered all the storms since the big elm was a sapling. It takes him a long time to think, but he always thinks firmly.

"If I report you, I get fired myself for leaving John Groat's gate open," he sagely concludes. "We say nothing about it; any of us."

They overwhelm Sexton Miller with thanks. Some of the girls laugh and some of them cry, and some of them give him fudge; and the young men shake him by the hand and give him money. Then, with the fudge-happy Jiggs dancing ahead, the girls slip into the dormitory by the back way and hurry into their beds, undetected, and giggle themselves to sleep; while Sexton Miller cleans out the mausoleum, with the. night wind sighing and sobbing and moaning just outside. Wooooooo! it wails, and Weeeeeeee! and the odor of hot fudge is still on its breath.

They are so happy in Old Snooper's dormitory this night! They have stolen. their long-contemplated fudge party, and nothing has happened; not a single thing!

VII

ABOVE THE SCENES

There is no expressing the tremendous consternation which overwhelms Department G! One of the most elaborate and far-reaching plans which had been entrusted to it has not been completed as per schedule! The fore-goddess of Department G comes. rushing up to Fate in a high state of flurry.

"There can be only one explanation for this occurrence!" she protests. "It was impossible for any one but yourself to interfere with John Groat's unlocking that mausoleum gate!"

"Quite so," observes Fate serenely, crossing her daintily sandaled pink feet and smoothing her beautifully arched eyebrows. "I changed my mind."

"But, from the time he was born, John Groat has been assigned to unlock that gatea that moment!" insists the fore-goddess of De partment G. She is a large brunette goddes, and Fate is not extremely partial to her

"That's my affair," replies Fate. "Serd me up Roxana Forester's card."

"What about the rest?" demands the fore-goddess, who knows her rights " only the balance of these twenty peop but all the others whom the chas their destinies were to affect? T、 just one case.' The brunette goddess brow has cleared of indignation, which is new replaced by genuine worry. Dorothea Marsh, for example. She was to meet a man at home, day after to-morrow, when she was eventually to marry. The daughter of herself and that man was to marry the future Emperor of France, and the necting has already been arranged. Through ther France was to return to hold strength and become the most brilliant nation in the world! Why, following a these people into the fourth and fifth generation, this little change of mind o your part wa necessitate the complete erran wonent of millions of destinies! What snali ve do with all these people?"

Fate rises and drapes her classic garrichts carefully about her. She puts on her bor, net, and glances out to see it her faverite pink cloud is in waiting.

"Leave them without destinies." she remarks, with an impish satisfaction.

Thus at last we un rstanu now it is that there are so many people in the world who do not know why they ? irving

all the many rat portages, this is the most northerly. It is not the Rat Portage of Manitoba, Missouri, or Allegash, but that lying above the Arctic Circle, on the most northerly pass of the Rocky Mountains.

You come to it by traveling something like two thousand miles northwestward by Hudson's Bay Company steamers from Athabasca Landing just above Edmonton. You pass Lake Athabasca and Great Bear Lake, and finally, near the delta mouth of the Mackenzie river, you reach Fort McPherson on the Peel. The Rat Portage is the road that leads from the Mackenzie River basin to the Yukon basin-up-stream by way of the Rat River, over the range, and down-stream by way of the Porcupine.

For the purposes of history it may be said that it was on the Rat Portage that many Klondikers came to grief in 1897-98, that time of geography gone insane. It was these returned Klondikers that never got to the Klondike who gave the Rat Portage its sinister reputation.

It is the touchstone of Northern heroism. "Ah! you have crossed the Rat?" That

opens to you the most exclusive doors at Old Crow, at Rampart House, Fort Yukon, and other places of which you never hearddoors so exclusive that we opened some of them with an ax, as who should break into New York society.

Having crossed the Rat, and being therefore some hero, it ill becomes me to employ other than heroic speech in this tale of derring-do. Afar to the north then, aloof, enshrouded with the eternal mysteries of the icy North, passing between two vast and unknown waterways of the unconquerable wilderness, and hedged about with glittering, snow-swept peaks, lies the inscrutable, the invincible, the peerless Portage du or de la Rat.

Why cross the Rat Portage at all? A great many friends asked us that. They mocked at us, urged us, questioned us too far; and at last we turned. "Now you have gone far enough. Why does a man cross the Rat-why did we cross it? Very well, we crossed it for the same reason that the hen crossed the r-r-r-road!"

And when all is said and done, I know no

more rational, lucid, and conclusive reply.

The actual truth is and all good outdoor men know it perfectly well-that all the wild places of the world are astonishingly accessible and astonishingly devoid of thrills to-day. Greenland's icy mountains and Afric's torrid sands are full of tracks and tin cans now. Few wildernesses live up to their reputations.

Some men even now think the crossing of the Rat Portage, the farthest-north pass of the Rockies, to be an undertaking involving great risk. And for some it would be. None the less, you could, if you knew how, take a man across the Rat Portage in a silk hat and patent-leather shoes and not much damage either the hat or the shoes. A white woman crossed the Rat Portage the summer before, by boat, from the Mackenzie to the Yukon; another did the previous year. And they had no special hardships.

You must "siwash it" on the Rat, as the Alaska saying is-sleep little and rough, live hard, work and forge ahead. That is all. It is a lark or a crime, a delight or a regrettable experience, just in accordance with

your own temperament and that of your party, and in accordance with the ability of all to siwash it in good cheer.

In our own case we experienced no hardships worth mention beyond being obliged to eat four meals a day and to get up before noon; and our numbers were not "decimated" any more than Amundsen's dogs when he found the South Pole-he had maybe sixty when he began his voyage and by the time he got to Buenos Aires he had a hundred and fifty-seven. We started on the trail as five, and when we came out we were seven, like the children in the Third Reader. We got six thousand feet of moving-picture film, and nine thousand miles of travel; and all of us have had far harder and riskier trips elsewhere.

No stranger should leave the city and cross the Rat without taking a "movie" outfit along. That is the way to see life. If possible, secure as operator a man like our Max-which isn't his name just over from Germany and with no English except that acquired in the workrooms of an American film company, which is a language all its own.