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Penny's Pit—a tear in a hill, and by the side of that tear two box-cars converted into bunk-houses for us, and a third into kitchen and dining-room with a cubby-hole partitioned off for the cook to sleep in. It had been a home for a spell. Sitting on the butt-end of a tie, with my legs over the gorge, darning socks in the exquisite evenings, I had seen, nightly, two loons come home to a spreading part of the Thompson River below; and every evening, as they settled on the water, they called, and laughed. The call of loons in the West has something in it for me at least, though chacun son goût of course, every time I hear it, even beyond the first call of cuckoos in England. In my memory, since then, they have laughed for me at many subsequent hardships.

And talking of the sounds at Penny's Pit, before we start upon our way—for this is but preamble, while we roll our blankets: one wonderful thing I heard there and did not know what it was at the time. None of us knew, looked one to another, marveled and puzzled over it. The sound we heard was as a bell ringing; but such a bell! The notes of it were exquisite, toning right with the clarity of the upland atmosphere. We stopped our work and looked round and up, for the sound seemed simply in air. Nothing that could have been responsible for it was visible. It was as though the mysterious First Cause who had made that scene and that river was, in addition to all else, ventriloquist. The Indians working beside us were awed. I thought of the bell-bird and wondered if it came thither, as well as to the forests of Essequibo, Orinoco and Amazon. Humming-birds fly far north in the basking summers; why not a bell-bird? Not a cloud. Nothing. Just the very quiet sand-hills on all sides, and the very blue sky overhead; and it was not till years later that I had an explanation on coming across an account of a phenomenon seldom known, and only heard in Dry Belts, a sound as of a sweet-toned bell made by electricity in the air.