comes there?” through the darkness, who dig in trenches, who are blown to pieces in mines, who are torn by shot and shell, who have carried the flag of England into every land, who have made her name famous through the nations, who are the nation’s pride in her hour of peril and her plaything-in her hour of prosperity—­these are the rank and file.  We are a curious nation; until lately we bought our rank, as we buy our mutton, in a market; and we found officers and gentlemen where other nations would have found thieves and swindlers.  Until lately we flogged our files with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and found heroes by treating men like dogs.  But to return to the rank and file.

The regiment-which had been selected for the work of piercing these solitudes of the American continent had peculiar claims for that service.  In bygone times it had been composed exclusively of Americans, and there was not an Expedition through all the wars which England waged against France in the New World in which the 60th, or “Royal Americans,” had not taken a prominent part.  When Munro yielded to Montcalm the fort of William Henry, when Wolfe reeled back from Montmorenci and stormed Abraham, when Pontiac swept the forts from Lake Superior to the Ohio, the 60th, or Royal Americans, had ever been foremost in the struggle.  Weeded now of their weak and sickly men, they formed a picked ’body, numbering 350 soldiers, of whom any nation on earth might well be proud.  They were fit to do anything and to go any where; and if a fear lurked in the minds of any of them, it was that Mr. Riel would not show fight.  Well led, and officered by men who shared with them every thing, from the portage-strap to a roll of tobacco, there was complete confidence from the highest to the lowest.  To be wet seemed to be the normal condition of man, and to carry a pork-barrel weighing 200 pounds over a rocky portage was but constitutional and exhilarating exercise—­such were the men with whom, on the evening of the 8th of August, I once more reached the neighbourhood’ of the Rat Portage.  In a little bay between many islands the flotilla halted just before entering the reach which led to the portage.  Paddling on in front with Samuel in my little canoe, we came suddenly upon four large Hudson Bay boats with full crews of Red River half-breeds and Indians-they were on their way to meet the Expedition, with the object of rendering what assistance they could to the troops in the descent of the Winnipeg river.  They had begun, to despair of ever falling in with it, and great was the excitement at the sudden meeting; the flint-gun was at once discharged into the air, and the shrill shouts began to echo through the islands.  But the excitement on the side of the Expedition was quite as keen.  The sudden shots and the wild shouts made the men in the boats in rear imagine that the fun was really about to begin, and that a skirmish through the wooded isles would be the evening’s work.  The mistake was quickly discovered.  They were glad of course to meet their Red River friends; but somehow, I fancy, the feeling, of joy would certainly not have been lessened had the boats held the dusky adherents of the Provisional Government.