BLACK ROCK - A Tale of the Selkirk's
Ralph Connor
Published by Fleming H. Revell, Toronto, 1901

The Author of Black Rock, The Reverend Dr. Charles William Gordon, pen name, Ralph Connor, 1860-1937, was a church leader in the Presbyterian and United Churches in Canada. The Ralph Connor House is a National Historic Site in Canada. Black Rock was his first novel in 1898. Introduction by Professor George Adam Smith, LL.D. Description: 

“It was due to a mysterious dispensation of Providence and a good deal to Leslie Graeme that I found myself in the heart of the Selkirks for my Christmas eve as the year 1882 was dying. It had been my plan to spent my Christmas far away in Toronto, with such bohemian and boon companions as could be found in that cosmopolitan and kindly city. But Leslie Graeme changed all that, for, discovering me in the village of Black Rock, with my traps all packed, waiting for the stage to start for the Landing, thirty miles away, he bore down upon me with resistless force, and I found myself recovering from my surprise only after we had gone in his lumber sleigh some six miles on our way to his camp up in the mountains.

 I was surprised and much delighted, though I would not allow him to think so, to find that his old time power over me was still there. He could always in the old varsity days---dear, wild days---make me do what he liked. He was so handsome and so reckless, brilliant in his class work, and the prince of halfbacks on the Rugby field, and with such power of fascination as would ‘extract the heart out of a wheelbarrow’ as Barney Lundy used to say. 

And thus it was that I found myself just three weeks later, I was to have spend two or three days, on the afternoon of December 24, standing in Graeme’s Lumber Camp No. 2, wondering at myself. But I did not regret my changed plans, for in those three weeks I had raided a cinnamon bear’s den and had wakened up a grizzly, but, I shall let the grizzly finish the tale; he probably sees more humor in it than I.”


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