spot!  What strife in the days of the rival companies!  Edmonton is a city still marked by the fine savour of the “Old-Timers,” who meet once a year to renew associations, and for some fleeting but glorious hours recall the past on the great river.  Age is thinning them out, and by and by the remainder man will shake his “few, sad, last gray hairs,” and slip out, too.  But the tradition of him, it is to be hoped, will live, and bind his memory forever to the soil he trod, when all this Western world was a wilderness, each primitive settlement a happy family, each unit an unsophisticated, hospitable soul.

To our mortification we found that our supplies, seasonably shipped at Winnipeg, would not arrive for several days; a delay, to begin with, which seemed to prefigure all our subsequent hindrances.  Then rain set in, and it was the afternoon of the 29th before Mr. Round could get us off.  Once under way, however, with our thirteen waggons, there was no trouble save from their heavy loads, which could not be moved faster than a walk.  Our first camp was at Sturgeon River—­the Namao Sepe of the Crees—­a fine stream in a defile of hills clothed with poplar and spruce, the former not quite in leaf, for the spring was backward, though seeding and growth in the Edmonton District was much ahead of Manitoba.  The river flat was dotted with clumps of russet-leaved willows, to the north of which our waggons were ranged, and soon the quickly pitched tents, fires and sizzling fry-pans filled even the tenderfoot with a sense of comfort.

Next morning our route lay through a line of low, broken hills, with scattered woods, largely burnt and blown down by the wind; a desolate tract, which enclosed, to our left, the Lily Lake—­Ascutamo Sakaigon—­a somewhat marshy-looking sheet of water.  Some miles farther on we crossed Whiskey Creek, a white man’s name, of course, given by an illicit distiller, who throve for a time, in the old “Permit days,” in this secluded spot.  Beyond this the long line of the Vermilion Hills hove in sight, and presently we reached the Vermilion River, the Wyamun of the Crees, and, before nightfall, the Nasookamow, or Twin Lake, making our camp in an open besmirched pinery, a cattle shelter, with bleak and bare surroundings, neighboured by the shack of a solitary settler.  He had, no doubt, good reasons for his choice; but it seemed a very much less inviting locality than Stony Creek, which we came to next morning, approaching it through rich and massive spruce woods, the ground strewn with anemones, harebells and violets, and interspersed with almost startlingly snow-white poplars, whose delicate buds had just opened into leaf.