“No, missus.”  When we ask their names, without tittering or looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens.  Here they have once more their white brothers “skinned”; no civilised man, woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal name in an audible tone without feeling a fool.  I have seen grizzled judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses, squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed them “Archer Martin” or “Peter Secord” or whatever it might be.

It is certainly Old Worldish.  We speak with Father Laity who, all unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail and reads his breviary.  He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war.  The Father came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.

Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow.  The Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.  The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence.  Does the whole family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this tern?  In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow.  Afterward we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means “A man born.”

Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh.  The Yellow-Knives were so named by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons of native copper.  Each head of a family is issued an identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to year.  A father “draws treaty” for his olive-skinned branches until each marries and erects a tepee for himself.  Government Agent Conroy, big bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.  Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun.  There are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation.  The Fiddler Anns, Waggon-box Julias, and Mrs. Turkeylegs of the Plains country are absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.

[Illustration:  Coming to “Take Treaty” on Great Slave Lake]