Quin spent much of her short writing life restless, leaving England for Europe and America whenever finances allowed, crossing borders and moving onwards in search of new experiences while also seeking the space she needed to be able to write. During the early 1960s, she had travelled to Bantry in Ireland, to Italy, Paris, Amsterdam and Scotland. In the summer of 1964, Quin journeyed across Italy and the Ionian Sea, initially to Parga, and then on to Athens, Corfu, Ithaca and Kolymos, hoping to make it to Istanbul but being prevented by riots. A postcard to John Calder from this time has a photograph of statues of ‘Olympia. Centaur seizing a Lapithan girl’ on the front, and on the back, scribbled in black felt-tip, ‘S.O.S. £.s.d. needed – desperate. Istanbul riots. Please forward to: c/o L. Matheovdaki, 4, Seremeti, Corfu, Greece’. The postcard depicting classical Greece and Quin's words describing tumultuous political circumstances and pressing financial need are striking for how they connect with and communicate her fluctuating movements caught between the desire for excitement, for life to be ‘EXPERIENCE in caps period’, and the desire for flight. ‘I have very much two extremes’, she said to Nell Dunn, to sometimes be the life and soul of the party but then a desperate need for stability and seclusion, for the ‘peace and stillness’ to write, as well as an ongoing emotional and here again material precariousness.

In late spring 1965 she sailed to New York to take up her Harkness Fellowship. Quin did not enjoy this first trip to America. She felt increasingly frenetic and conflicted, and hated what she called this ‘whale's mouth of a city, where people paddle—swim up sidewalks that are fallen ladders’.

A number of canonical figures who deeply admired Montesquieu were equally committed to protecting the integrity of the public sphere from commerce. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville and, more recently, Hannah Arendt each revised Montesquieu's theory of free, moderate government to make political honours available to a broader citizenry. However, they disagreed over the degree to which the commercial and political worlds needed to be kept separate. One will find a divergence on this question in the political thought of Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith who were considered heirs to Montesquieu in their immediate contexts. Both Scottish philosophers embraced modern commerce as the organising principle of eighteenth-century Europe. However, like Montesquieu, they were not unconcerned with the civic challenges posed by the new commercial order. In considering how Ferguson and Smith approximate political virtue in their respective works, this chapter delineates how each thinker appropriated Montesquieu's moderation to a more egalitarian, burgeoning commercial world of mass production and capital accumulation – one marked by the new civic challenges that advanced commercial specialisation introduced to European nations.

As we had no minister at Babelmandel, I need not tell the courteous reader we had no church; but when we were visited by a preacher, we contrived to make a temporary place of worship, in one of the buildings which the speculators were erecting for a tavern. On the occasion of Mr. Bell's preaching, the weather being calm and bright, a pulpit was raised in the open air, under a large tree—the elm under which my sweet baby's sad wake was held, and the settlers assembled around him from all parts of the settlement well on to the number of a thousand persons, old and young,—the greatest congregation we had yet collected. I missed, however, Mr. Waft from the crowd; an extraordinary thing, considering the business of the day; it being understood, that if Mr. Bell gave satisfaction, we were to engage him for three months.

At first, I imagined something had surely happened to the bodie, and I was angry with myself that any thought about him should interfere with my attention to the sermon, which was really worthy of all I could bestow on it, being not only sound and orthodox, but delivered with a force and style of language far above common. Towards the conclusion, I however discovered him walking at some distance among the trees behind the pulpit, as if keeping aloof from the congregation, yet curious to see what was going on. By and by he drew nearer and nearer, till he caught my eye; which he had no sooner done, than he shook his head in a significant manner, and gave a queer distrustful smile, as much as to say. This is poor stuff, and will never do;—I was both vexed and surprised.

It would not be easy to describe what I suffered at witnessing such irreverence, being totally incapable of understanding what it meant, for the matter and the manner of the preacher were both most excellent; so I resolved, as soon as the service should be over, to interrogate the motives of such indecorum; but at the conclusion, the molester was nowhere to be seen.

There are a few starting points for this project, but perhaps the most important comes from puzzling over the scholarly maxim that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This is true, but an absence of evidence is also not evidence of presence.

The Dead Sea Scrolls represent an unexpected cache for the historian, offering new windows onto Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. But we often have tattered fragments of manuscripts, when we would prefer pristine productions, and what we might see by way of our new data-set is necessarily limited by our material remains. We can easily understand the draw of a “full” work, or even the possibility thereof. Even the way we articulate the remains, as “fragments,” leaves conceptual room for the existence of a whole. However, some works attested at Qumran, where the Scrolls were found, are found nowhere else. Since Second Temple fragments are all we have, we quickly reach a limit on our reconstructions of literary wholes.

Nevertheless, some works found at Qumran seem to be textually related to works found in other manuscript traditions; that is, the same text is found on leather scraps at Qumran, as is also found in late ancient or medieval parchment leaves or papyrus codices. The non-Qumran witnesses are often, materially, better preserved: less tattered and fragmentary, more continuous and perceptibly whole-looking. It is therefore easy to correlate superior material preservation with the hypothesis of better textual preservation, and assume that fuller documents best model the literary whole to which all our material remains attest.

1 Enoch, as I understand it, succinctly demonstrates the flaws of this logic in practice. 1 Enoch is the modern scholarly name for an Ethiopic work known as Henok (ሄኖክ). 1 Enoch was likely translated into Gəʿəz between the fourth and sixth centuries ce. But the text of 1 Enoch is not attested in manuscripts until the fourteenth century ce. 1 Enoch contains a great deal of textual material that corresponds to that found in a set of Qumran fragments. Therefore, the Ethiopic is sometimes called the “fullest” or “complete” version of the work or works represented by our Qumran fragments.

INTRODUCTION

This edition of Conan Doyle's 1894 collection of short stories, Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, follows the policy of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle in using the first London book edition (in this case published by Methuen) as the base text (E1). Variants from the journal versions of some of the stories ( JV) and the Author's Edition of 1903 (AE), the John Murray collections of short stories from 1922 (JM), and the manuscript (MS) where available have been collated with E1. Any significant decisions about excisions or changes of emphasis between these versions are noted in the Apparatus. There survives a fair copy handwritten manuscript of one story, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (MS), although this is unenlightening other than on Conan Doyle's attitude towards punctuation (see below).

Appendix 1 includes two stories later added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of RTRL, which represents the most expanded version of the collection. ‘My Friend the Murderer’ was one of Conan Doyle's earliest publications in London Society magazine in 1882. ‘Crabbe's Practice’ has a more complicated history. This story was first published in the Boy's Own Paper in 1884. Conan Doyle did not often choose to reprint early stories, but for the Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, published in the 1922 JM volumes that disassembled and reframed his short stories into new thematic collections, he did return to and revise ‘Crabbe's Practice’. Perhaps signalling his dissatisfaction with his early attempts at fiction, Conan Doyle virtually rewrote the tale line by line, a relatively unusual occurrence in his career. These emendations were considered far too extensive to track in detail. It was this 1922 version of the story from JM that was added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of Round the Red Lamp. Since it did not appear in the first edition of RTRL in 1894, but did so in the expanded 1930 edition, this volume has chosen to reprint this JM version, as reflecting the author's latest intention for the work in the context of his medical fiction.

Set in fin-de-siècle Rome, Il Piacere (1889) combines psychological analysis and Decadent atmospheres with stunning descriptions of the recent Italian capital. It is a text rooted in an Italian city and written for Italian readerships, but it also displays a transnational dimension, testified by references to European literature, music and the arts, as well as by words and sentences in English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, Greek and even Sanskrit. On the one hand, literary cosmopolitanism signals engagement with the other: the novel stages an intimate dialogue with foreign literary traditions, including Decadence and Aestheticism. On the other hand, this very dialogue is used for nationalistic ends, as it aims to challenge Italy's peripheral role in modern Europe and to demonstrate the superiority of the highly educated Italian upper class.

This chapter explores the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism inherent to the multilingual fabric of the text, focusing on how this dynamic was renegotiated as Il Piacere crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries. To this end, I will first foreground the role of foreign borrowings, translation and intertextual references, paying particular attention to the function that languages other than Italian assume within and beyond the text, and to how they relate to gender and class constructs. Drawing on D’Annunzio's correspondence with his French translator, Georges Hérelle, and on Hérelle's memoires, I will then explore how this ‘romanzo di pura forma’ (novel of pure form) that, as D’Annunzio noted, had ‘qualche parentela con À Rebours di J. K. Huysmans’ (something to do with À Rebours by J. K. Huysmans), travelled back to France, the ‘centre’ of the Symbolist and Decadent movement in the nineteenth century, and how the multilingual fabric of the text was affected in this transition. The worlding of the novel, as I shall show, involved a series of compromises and negotiations, and D’Annunzio had to fight hard for the coexistence of cosmopolitanism and international fame.

The Provost's lady had scarcely composed herself from her agitation of merriment, to tell us what Miss Beeny had said, when the minister of the parish, the Rev. Dr. Glasham, attended by one of his elders, was shown into the room. It was clear to be seen they came to examine into the fact; at the same time, I saw plainly by the Rev. Gentleman's countenance, that he, as well as the whole community, had no very solemn ideas on the subject.

Dr. Glasham, of Chucky Stanes, was, indeed, no ordinary member of the Church of Scotland, both by reputation, and by what, of my own knowledge, I came to understand of him. He was such, merely as a man, that we seldom meet with. Not only was he unaffectedly pious in his sentiments, kindly and Christian at all points, and learned beyond many of his cloth; but he was of a jocose humour, and would carry a joke as far as any man I ever met with. Truly, he was a facetious brother; while austere towards every kind of dissoluteness, he was yet lenient in his judgment of many transactions, that men of less practical virtue would have treated with inexorable severity.

When he was first informed of the unspeakable outrage which it was alleged had actually been perpetrated, he thought there must be some exaggeration in the story; and he had come in gentle charity to try, however the case might be, to get the blaspheming tongue of the public stopped, by procuring the owning of a fault between Miss Beeny and me. To own a fault where no harm had been done, I was not likely to do; and, moreover, marriage was tied to the tail of it, to which I was determined, for less than the halter, never to assent.

After some general discourse, not of a very deep tint, which convinced me that all present were little disposed to countenance such a case as Miss Beeny pretended to set forth, Dr. Glasham proposed that she should he called in, and a precognition taken by him, before any charge should be laid before the magistrates.

Like Woolf, but in very different circumstances, Quin's literary education came more from library reading than formal schooling. In ‘Leaving School – XI’ (1966), she says she ‘sleepwalked through’ convent school years in Brighton, ‘More curious by what the nuns wore in bed. If they were really bald … than split infinitives’, ‘Amo, amas, amat’ and irregular verbs. The ‘possibilities in writing’ of ‘books discovered in the Public Library’ were far more inspiring, together with Saturday afternoons at ‘a seat in the Gods at the Theatre Royal’.

Except for a brief return to education in her late thirties, Quin's schooling ended in 1953, when she was seventeen. Her first job was as an assistant stage manager, where she wrote poems in her lunch breaks and dreamed of becoming an actor, while spending time gathering props, scrubbing the stage, sewing, making tea, laughing at ‘camp jokes I didn't understand’. But hopes of acting ended when nerves sabotaged an audition to RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), and Quin returned ‘to the world of books’ and to writing. She won a 10 shilling book token prize for her poem ‘The Lost Seagull’ and vowed: ‘I would be a writer: A poet.’ But without financial security, Quin was in desperate need of ‘a means towards bread and butter’, so she took a secretarial course and, ‘Armed with shorthand and typewriting certificates I went to a secretarial agency in London.’

From the mid-1950s to early 1960s, Quin was a secretary (and sometimes reader) in various legal, media and publishing offices, as well as at St Dunstan's in Brighton and the Royal College of Art in London, where she worked for three years. The year 1959 found her living in a room in Soho, working for a publishing firm during the day and writing her first novel, A Slice of the Moon, at night. Quin's living conditions at this time (and for much of her life) were precarious: as she put it, ‘The salary I earned was barely enough for rent and food.’

On reaching Mrs. Cockspur's villa, I was shown into the parlour, where I found her alone, in great good-humour. She had just received a severe lecture on marriage in old age, from Miss Volumnia, and was longing to see me.

“I had observed,” said she, “for some days, the mutinous looks of the young men, without being able to divine the cause; and Volumnia has told me, that they are all determined I shall not marry you.”

Before I could make any answer, the young lady came in, and with her Marianne, my eldest daughter. The plot of the comedy was thickening. To hasten on the upshot, I expressed my delight at seeing them so lovingly sister-like.

“We shall never be sisters,” exclaimed the two indignant misses, in one voice, and in a tone so piercing and so wild, that it threw the old lady and myself into an immoderate fit of laughter, which provoked Miss Volumnia to a great degree; for she immediately cried, with rather more pith than was genteel,—

“If my mother will marry, it shall be Mr. Herbert.”

“That, my dear child,” replied I coolly, winking to her mother, “does not depend upon you: ‘shall’ is a naughty word for a dutiful daughter to use towards her parent. But, if there is to be a wedding, your mother has a right to please herself. Come, come, Voly——”

“None of your familiarities, sir!” was the tart rejoinder. “Voly, indeed! Oh! has it come to that?” And she sat down in a torrent of tears.

“You are a foolish girl,” said Mrs. Cockspur, quite unable to preserve her gravity, yet, from the gentleness of her disposition, inclined not to afflict the poor maiden too severely—“you are a foolish girl; I’m sure Mr. Todd has always proved himself exceedingly kind to you;—had he been your own father, he could not have been more kind. I cannot think what makes you hate him so.”

“I don't hate him, if he would let you alone. Oh, he will be such an ugly step-father!”

Mr. Hoskins, after the purchase I had made from Mr. Nackets, became less anxious to return home. He saw, as he often said, “the settlement was a-going to do,” and his intention of moving to it from Vermont when he could get his farm there sold, was, every time we conversed on the subject, more and more strengthened. We agreed, however, not to open store regularly before the spring, when we should have a proper place constructed, and a right assortment of goods laid in; at the same time we thought it would be as well, not absolutely to abstain from supplying the settlers who could pay ready money for such articles as we then had. Thus it came to pass, that he stayed with us till the snow fell, with the first of which he set out in a sleigh to bring Mrs. Hoskins, and to dispose of his land and betterments. He had no children, and about this time he began to speak of leaving the bulk of his property to my family, if they should happen to survive himself and wife.

He had not, however, left us above three or four days, when symptoms of a change began to appear in the settlement;—so long as the public works, roads, clearings, &c. undertaken by the speculators had continued to give employment and wages to the settlers, every thing went on prosperously, and even for some time after the seasonable suspension, no visible diminution of their contentment and industry was discernible. But the savings of their wages were at last exhausted; the severity of the winter caused a greater outlay among them for clothes than the most provident were prepared for; and so general was the distress in consequence, that the agent grew seriously alarmed, lest the settlement should be broken up.

In this crisis, one day, when the agent came to see how we were getting on, he entered my house, and familiarly taking a stool by the fire, spoke to me of his anxieties, pointing out how detrimental any considerable desertion would be to the speculation, especially following so close upon the heels of the failure at Olympus.

In 1922, Carlo Bertelli, the Hearst Corporation's Chief of the editorial staff for France and Southern Europe, asked Gabriele D’Annunzio to write a column on Italian Fascism. The request reached D’Annunzio a few days after the March on Rome (27–9 October 1922), Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party act to seize power. The Corporation – a leading US media empire founded in 1887 by William Randolph Hearst – sought an authoritative voice to explain this political movement to the US public, which he claimed did not fully understand Fascism, as indicated by publications comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan that ‘terrorises the American population by arrogating itself executive power’. Hence, Bertelli wrote, D’Annunzio's article should counterbalance the news on Fascist violence that reached the USA and endorse the rise of Fascism by explaining its ideals and values. Bertelli contacted D’Annunzio because he was a wellknown leader of the Italian right-wing and an established columnist in Hearst's news network. He thus supposed that D’Annunzio's political stance would align with Hearst's pro-Fascist political line. Although D’Annunzio was offered a considerable sum for the article, he refused to praise Fascism in the US press (just as he never praised it in Italy).

This little-known episode illustrates two aspects of D’Annunzio's reception in the USA. On the one hand, it shows D’Annunzio's authority among the US public, which derived from his reputation as an opinionist in US newspapers from the late 1890s and from his role in both the First World War and the Fiume crisis. In this chapter, we assess this aspect by examining D’Annunzio's correspondence with US editors and representatives of the US government, as well as his articles published in the US press.

On the other hand, this episode is an early indication of the critical misconceptions regarding D’Annunzio's relationship to Italian Fascism, a misconception that ‘became automatic from the 1920s–1930s and would remain as such in the post-war period’. From the 1970s onwards, authoritative scholars have pointed out that Mussolini celebrated D’Annunzio as the precursor of Fascism and appropriated his political style, but also that D’Annunzio was in disagreement with major political decisions of the regime, such as the Lateran Pacts of 1929 and the imminent alliance with Hitler.

After some conversation with Mr. Herbert, with reference to the change which the banking arrangement promised to his ostensible circumstances, I urged him seriously to renew his acquaintance with Mrs. Cockspur.

“No,” said he; “I mastered my passion when young, respected, and amidst the assurances of good fortune;—can I now, an old man, bent beneath the burden of many disappointments, with a withered heart and a shaking hand, claim more than pity even from affection?”

Seeing him in this mood (I wonder what it is that makes men of superiority so inaccessible to judicious counsel?) I said nothing, but I formed a plan of my own, and, as delays are dangerous, I lost no time in carrying it into effect. Accordingly, on the morning after the departure of the bankers, I went to Judiville, partly to see how the buildings for the house and store were coming on, but chiefly to have a few rational words in a corner with Mrs. Cockspur.

It may be thought, that in taking up this business, I was too much, like John Waft, troubling myself with matters that did not appertain to me; but I could not help it. I was much taken with the appeased character of Mr. Herbert: he was so evidently by nature an heir to a rich inheritance of fortune and honour, that I could not but regret so noble a spirit should be so far out of its proper sphere. It was this charity that prompted me; an up-looking charity that finds its best reward in self-approval. But I must not forget a resolution made in early life never to praise myself; so, without more ado, I shall now rehearse what I did at Judiville with the worthy old lady.

I have already mentioned how I was obliged to Mr. Bradshaw Cockspur for the plan of the house and store, and how the business concerning the same led to an intimacy with the family. This intimacy allowed me the freedom of paying my respects at all times to Mrs. Cockspur; and accordingly, at a period of the day when the young gentlemen, I knew, were abroad, I went to her.

This chapter studies references to Japanese culture and literature in Gabriele D’Annunzio's poetry. It explores how Japonism, a cultural phenomenon that swept through Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, was absorbed by D’Annunzio and reflected in his lyrics. To this end, I begin by tracking traces of Japan at D’Annunzio's villamuseum, the Vittoriale. I then turn to D’Annunzio's early writings and examine how they portray and interpret the fascination with Japan. The main focus of my analysis is ‘Outa occidentale’, a poem by D’Annunzio written in Italian with adapted Japanese metrics. This poem was first published on 14 June 1885 in Fanfulla della domenica, on the same day as D’Annunzio's review of an anthology of Japanese poems by Judith Gautier, Poémes de la libellule. ‘Outa occidentale’ was later included in Chimera, the collection of D’Annunzio's poetry released by the editor Treves in 1890. As I will argue, this is a case of absorbing Japanese poetics into the Italian language, which is rooted in a very different linguistic structure. While embedded in Orientalism and exoticism, it can be considered a remarkable transcultural operation, which involved blending methods, metrics and subjects from Italian and Japanese traditions. In what follows, I show that this exercise was not an episodic experiment but an integral part of D’Annunzio's program to renew modern poetic language, in which the absorption of new, ‘distant’ elements was of primary importance. Studying D’Annunzio's fascination with Japan and Japanese poetry also contributes to our understanding of his view of translation as cross-cultural adaptation.

Testimonies of Japonaiserie in the D’Annunzio's Late Years

The Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone, a villa-museum surrounded by a vast park with a breathtaking view of Lake Garda, testifies to D’Annunzio's taste for exotic ‘kitsch’ and to his penchant for the Oriental. Among the so-called ‘chinoiseries’, things of Chinese taste found in the Bagno blu (blue bathroom), and in the dining room featuring an enormous tortoise named Cheli, there are also several Japanese pieces. Of note is a prestigious historical sword from Bicchu Osafune, a renowned place producing traditional samurai swords; this was brought by the Japanese mission for the Project of Translating the Decameron.

As Stephen Teo, Vivian Lee and other scholars have pointed out, Johnnie To's The Mission (Qianghuo, 1999) was a turning point in the Hong Kong filmmaker's directorial career, one in which he began to prioritise group ethics – of triads, of gangsters, of police squads – over acts of individual heroism. Concerning a motley crew of five bodyguards hired by a triad boss to protect him from assassination attempts, The Mission furthermore marks an aesthetic transition to ‘stasis within motion’ or ‘stillness as a form of action’, departing from hyperbolic action sequences that had previously characterised To's films in particular and Hong Kong cinema more generally (Teo 2007, 133; Lee 2009, 93). David Bordwell observes that another shift is discernible in the 2012 release of To's Drug War (Du zhan) – his production company Milkyway Image's first film shot entirely in Mainland China – in terms of its aesthetics and the denial of its protagonists’ moral values (2013; see also Chu 2015, 192–205). In this nihilistic film, Timmy Choi (Louis Koo), a member of a drug cartel from Hong Kong, would risk anything, including trust and brotherhood, to save his own life. The group ethics endorsed by To in such films as The Mission and PTU: Police Tactical Unit (Jidong budui, 2003) are not to be found in Drug War, only the political and legal system that punishes characters whose actions deviate from it. As Sun Yi points out, survival is not only the primary concern for Timmy, but also an apt metaphor for the Hong Kong film industry as a whole (2018, 228).

The shifting moral, political purview manifest in Drug War provides a useful starting point for a comparison with its Korean-language remake, director Lee Hae-young's Believer (Dokjeon, 2018), which initially appears to be anchored in the individual rivalry between Won-ho (Cho Jin-woong), a detective, and Mr Lee (Ryu Jun-yeol), the secret mastermind behind a sprawling cocaine production network in South Korea. In this chapter, I focus on how the remake's restructuring of the earlier film's plot restricts characters’ mobility. Despite the two films’ diverging moral compasses and the spaces that are used, there remains an underlying similarity that allows us to uncover their respective sociopolitical systems, which deprive individuals of agency.

Such is the life of man—toil and disappointment. The day is too short; our strength insufficient to satisfy the greed of avarice. Our doom is labour, our earnings dust; the fruit cultivated with so much care contains but ashes. All is vanity!

Such was the substance of the cloud of sad thoughts which rose upon me as I stood by the corpse of my father. Rich and prosperous, and untarnished in my integrity, I had come to receive his last blessing. Gladness and generosity glowed in my bosom. With more than the hopes of my youth realised, I had returned to the scenes of my childhood; the anticipations of ambition were in blossom, and the fruit of many was set. There was but one in all the earth whom the munificent tale of Providence could have awakened to disinterested thankfulness, and there he lay, apparelled for the tomb. It was then that I first felt the truth of Mr. Herbert's opinions on old age; and I trembled to think that, by the course of nature, I now myself stood next to the grave.

To meet contemptuous Death instead of my father, who had so kindly loved me, was truly a stunning blow. It shattered, as it were, my whole mind, and my thoughts were as fragments. I could determine nothing; I scarcely even recollected that I had seen my contrite son at the door. Poor lad! he ascribed to resentment that absence with which I was visited, and my seeming indifference to him, and he retired to the garden to deplore my displeasure. I saw him not again that night, for I spent it alone with the dead.

Early in the morning, before sunrise, the afflicted youth, unable longer to endure the thought of being cast off from my affection, came into the room. At the sight of him, I reproached myself for having so slightly heeded him; but before I could speak, he took my hand, and looking for a moment on the still remains on the bed, he said, with an intreating voice, “Oh, my father!”

The landscape of North America is beautiful, pristine and wonderful. The land has majestic mountains such as the Rocky Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains, and freshwater lakes such as the Great Lakes of North America and Lake Tahoe. North America is surrounded by the world's two largest oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic. The vast continent is covered by deserts, forests, prairies, meadows, forests, canyons and wilderness. It has countless small towns as well as highly populated metropolitan cities. The land was first inhabited by Native Americans and First Nations, who lived off the land and in harmony with creation. It is a magnificent land, composed of only five countries, Canada, the USA, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Greenland and Bermuda.

Just as the land is diverse and bountiful, so are the people who live in these five countries. Though their history is short compared with countries in such contexts as Asia, South America, Africa and Europe, it has been filled by devastation, horror and suffering. With the European conquest of Native land, the terror began for many Native and First Nations peoples as genocide was committed against them. The large-scale enslavement and importation of Africans brought further injustice, horror and suffering. During this horrific history, Christianity had a large presence and was part of the very fabric that caused the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Christian adoption of the Doctrine of Discovery and the perception of Africans as heathens made it theoretically justifiable to enslave them. In addition, Asians were viewed as heathens and foreigners, a perception which white Americans used to indenture them. Throughout this history of immigration, enslavement and conquest, Christianity was deeply implicated in colonialism, subjugation and domination.

Due to increased immigration and the entrance of refugees during the last 70 years, North America is a very racially diverse place. This diversity means that various languages are spoken and different cultural customs are lived out. Many people who came from difficult situations found opportunities to build a new life in North America. Some refugees were able to start fresh lives and contribute to the wider society. Coming from many different backgrounds, they have formed an enterprising people who have built one of the world's strongest economies.

Now my wife was one of those quiet, nocturnal women, who never talk after they have laid their heads on the pillow, but compose themselves for the embraces of Morpheus. On this night, however, it happened that the events of the day, and particularly the dreadful danger we had escaped, took wakeful possession of her serene faculties, and she was wonderfully disposed to be conversational; whereas, I had much to think of, and was not inclined to be communicative. There was, however, one short question which she put to me, that I could not but answer.

“What,” said she, “can my uncle mean by bringing us to these forlorn and wilderness parts? His wife, my aunt, cannot dive into his intents; and yet it is a moral certainty, that he would never have been at the expense of this voyage of discovery, had he not a makingof- money purpose in view.”

The only answer I could give, was what I gave: I acknowledged myself of her opinion, adding, “But as he has made no explanation of his intents, I am not in a condition to satisfy your curiosity; no doubt I, however, shall, for you and Charles, with Mrs. Hoskins, are to go by one of the teams to-morrow homeward by Olympus, whilst the old gentleman and I thread back the mazes of the wood.”

“You may do, Lawrie Todd, as you think fit; but from this house I will never stir, until I know the meaning of such mystical meanderings,” was her reply.

I reasoned with her against this unreasonableness, and spoke soft and persuasive language, doing every thing I could besides to subdue her to that moderation and common sense which were the graces of her character; but she was not to be so converted—so I turned my face to the other side of the bed, and gave no farther heed to her colloquies.

We rose before the sun: it was a sharp, purple morning, as if the cold air had given Aurora the complexion of a dairy-maid abroad too early. In so far, to me, it was not disagreeable, for the toil of walking in the woods has ever been great to my loose, shuffling feet; and the clambering over prostrate trees and cradle-heaps, with my brief legs, is always warm work. The behaviour of John Waft was not, however, satisfactory; he walked a little off on the one side from Robin and me, and was not, it seemed, in a conversable humour. But I was resolved not to have my trouble for nothing, so I began to jeer him for taking us a gowk's errand, and to make light of the mare's nest he was conducting us to see. He, however, took no heed of what I said, but plodded on straight-forward with his compass in his hand, so that, what with his sullen silence, and the rising wind, and the rough, untrodden road, our morning's journey was not much calculated to soften the austerity of my reflections. In short, before we had been out two hours, during which we did not travel quite four miles, I was growing testy and fretful: but for plain shame, I would have returned.

When we had come to the sixth mile blaize, a boundary mark on a pine, we halted to take some refreshment, near a fine spring that came hopping and leaping, as it were with gladness, out of a rock. This was in a part of the forest where I had never been, and it was a place that seemed to have been made on purpose for travellers to rest at. Here we tarried some time; and the bailie being, for so long, relieved of his care in tracing the road, resumed his wonted pleasing looks and quaint pawkrie, by which he, in a great measure, restored my comfort. The day, however, was evidently overcast; the thickly interwoven basketing of the arborous vaults above us, prevented the sky from being seen; but we knew by the deepened gloom around, and by seeing no shadows among the boughs, that the sun was obscured.