[Illustration:  On the Slave]

This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole North—­although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating.  All Hay River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail.  Red girls and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission, learning how to play the white man’s game—­jolly and clean little bodies they are.  It looks like Christmas time.  Parcels are being done up, there is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black eyes.  Would you like to see the letters that The Teaser, The Twin, Johnny Little Hunter, and Mary Blue Quill are sending out to their parents?  For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father’s and mother’s name.  The soap has been bought with the children’s pennies earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.  The parcels will be passed from one trapper’s jerkin to another, and when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or lodge of the deerskin, Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam and Mr. Kee-noo-shay-o, or The Fish, will know their boys and girls “still remember.”

One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his quest here, and lived happily ever after.  Their children are the most fascinating little people we have seen for many months.  Life is quaint at the Hay River Mission.  The impression we carry away is of earnest and sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness, letting their light shine where few there are to see it.  We discover the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in evergreen boughs for their summer bedding—­a delightful Ostermoor mattress of their own devising.  Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in summer, and in the winter they haul hay.  The hay causes our enquiry, and we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by some glacial drift of the long ago.  And thereby hangs a tale.  Charlie, an attache of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day.  As man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked, “Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?” “Bill balked,” was the laconic reply.  Tuesday’s question would bring the same response, “Bill balked.”  And “Bill balked,” on Wednesday.  Thursday it is—­“Bill didn’t balk”; and so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter days.

[Illustration:  Dogs Cultivating Potatoes]

The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60 deg.  Fahrenheit, and the monthly mean for January, 18 deg. below zero.  Vegetables of their own growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food supply of this thrifty Mission, one season’s harvest giving them a thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten thousand whitefish.