The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the dogs’ tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the big boat to make a landing.  Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr. C.P.  Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope.  Of the two thousand servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, this is the man who has the greatest number of years of active service to his credit.  Mr. Gaudet has continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition is to put in three years more.  The Company gives its employes a pension after thirty years’ service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely deserves two pensions.  The steps are almost precipitous, but the old gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to his superior officer.  Then the two climb up the bank together, the younger man giving a strong arm to the older.  We follow, and half-way up the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr. Brabant the view up river.  We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.

Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses, and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.  Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back from a far journey.  Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden:  it is hand-shaking gone mad.  We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide world.

We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your throat and makes you think of your mother.  She gives us home-made wine and galettes, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the window-ledge and look around the walls of the “homey” room we wonder if this really can be the “Arctic Circle, 23-1/2 deg. from the North Pole, which marks the distance that the sun’s rays,” etc., etc., as the little geographies so blithely used to state.  On the walls are the Sunday School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women, earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and girls—­the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below.  Here a pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned hat down a shiny road.  They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend runs,—­“Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a bottle and a little loaf of bread.”

Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first Scripture lesson from an R.C.  Sister, the story of our old Mother in the first garden.  One Sunday was review day, and this question arose:  “And how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?” Quick came the girlie’s reply, “They had to leave The Company’s service!”