of Garrick, with copies of Virgil, and all Voltaire and Corneille in the original.  A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the Apology for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber.  One wonders how a man embedded in Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the Grand Pays for Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, yet we find it here, cheek by jowl with The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life and Its Comforts.  The Annual Register of History, Politics, and Literature of the Year 1764 looks plummy, but we have to forego it.  The lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, Death-Bed Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a Dying Hour, bring to mind the small boy’s definition of porridge—­“fillin’, but not satis-fyin’.”  Two more little books with big titles are Actors’ Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues, and The London Prisons, with an Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in Them.

But the book that most tempts our cupidity is Memoirs of Miss A——­ n, Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars.  We want that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its silver mouths.  We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we hunger to steal it.  Jekyll struggles with Hyde.  At last the Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it down and softly close the door behind us.  And ever since we have regretted our Presbyterian training.

At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an old cathedral.  Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic.  We walk along the shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in washing clothes with washboards—­the old order and the new.  A little dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of Pyrola and a nest of Traills’ flycatcher, and makes us wish that the minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer.  What a beautiful tiling this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of its capsule!  Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.

Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting gold.  Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on the river.  Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard.  One of the couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon.  We half envy them their journey.  Can anything compare with the dear delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what lies round the next corner?