So he picked himself up, and, encouraged
by his virile optimism, began looking forward again. Bad luck had so worked
its hand in the moulding of him that he had come to live chiefly in
anticipation, and though this bad luck had played battledore and
shuttlecock with him, the things which he anticipated were pleasant and
beautiful. He believed that the human race was growing better, and that
each year was bringing his ideals just so much nearer to realization. More
than once he had told himself that he was living two or three centuries too
soon. Ransom, his old college chum, had been the first to suggest that he
was living some thousands of years too late.
He thought of this a great deal during the first pleasant weeks of the
autumn, which he and old Rameses spent up in the Lac la Ronge and Reindeer
Lake country. During this time he devoted himself almost entirely to the
study of Cree under Rameses' tutelage, and the more he learned of it the
more he saw the truth of what Ransom had told him once upon a time, that
the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world. At the upper end of
the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood
unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who
were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand
but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music.
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