I—­Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.

J—­Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).

K—­Three hat bands—­the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and the last in silk embroidery—­made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.

L—­Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).

M—­Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort Chipewyan.]

Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.  Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.  Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go through Electrical Training Schools.  With the knowledge thus gained he constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie.  Far up here on the map, too, the “Judge,” as he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending every timepiece in the country.  The corrected watches are carried to their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits.  A watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way down to Chicago.  The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the job.

Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day.  In the autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese, and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and put in ice chambers for winter use.  If the mosquitoes were not so bad we would spend hours in the woods here with “God’s jocund little fowls.”  These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all suspicion of bigger bipeds.  We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet (regulus calendula) which some one says sounds like “Chappie, chappie, jackfish.”  The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is “High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds.”  Rusty blackbirds are here with slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches.  We are fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two of the nesting white-throated, sparrow.  They are ferreted out for us by the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is “A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!” At our feet blossom cinquefoil, immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.