talk about the white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan.  What do they learn?  Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes, grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in Southern schools.  When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep (young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish meals for a twelve-month to come.  If fish be brain food, then should this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards, capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships ad lib.

[Illustration:  Three of a Kind]

Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record.  It was from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their proteges, that the sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal.  This wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.

We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane.  Sister Jigot, with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods.  In the long winter evenings these good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six o’clock.  The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light is all that the frugal exchequer can afford.  “What in the world do you do after six?” I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not content to rest in idle laps.  “Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to give us light.”  Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their candles like Alfred of old.

Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations.  At the Church of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from the leg of an injured Indian.  Afterward we learn that the peripatetic patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.  Poor chap, he died in the process!  But while he lived he stimulated trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale.  If there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably fore-ordained.

An interesting family lives next to the English Mission—­the Loutits.  The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company, and “for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a rabbit-track.”  There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old journals reach.  The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day’s generation is a family of striking young people—­the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding the strong men’s records of the North.