Bear Lake.  Locked in their fastnesses of ice and distance, these remote and friendless solitudes of the North must long remain, as they are at present, the great fur preserve of the Hudson Bay Company.  Dwellers within the limits of European states can ill comprehend the vastness of territory over which this Fur Company holds sway.  I say holds sway, for the north of North America is still as much in the possession of the Company, despite all cession of title to Canada, as Crusoe was the monarch of his island, or the man must be the owner of the moon.  From Pembina on Red River to Fort Anderson on the Mackenzie is as great a distance as from London to Mecca.  From the King’s Posts to the Pelly Banks is farther than from Paris to Samarcand, and yet today throughout that immense region the Company is king.  And what a king! no monarch rules his subjects with half the power of this Fur Company.  It clothes, feeds, and utterly maintains nine-tenths of its subjects.  From the Esquimaux at Ungava to the Loucheaux at Fort Simpson, all live by and through this London Corporation.  The earth possesses not a wilder spot than the barren grounds of Fort Providence; around lie the desolate shores of the great_ Slave Lake. Twice in the year news comes from the outside world-news many, many months old—­news borne by men and dogs through 2000 miles of snow; and yet even there the gun that brings down the moose and the musk-ox has been forged in a London smithy; the blanket that covers the wild Indian in his cold camp has been woven in a Whitney loom; that knife is from Sheffield; that string of beads from Birmingham.  Let us follow the ships that sail annually from the Thames bound for the supply of this vast region.  It is early in June when she gets clear of the Nore; it is mid-June when the Orkneys and Stornaway are left behind; it is August when the frozen Straits of Hudson are pierced; and the end of the month has been reached when the ship comes to anchor off the sand-barred mouth of the Nelson River.  For one year-the stores that she has brought lie in the warehouses of York factory; twelve months later they reach Red River; twelve months later again they reach Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie.  That rough flint-gun, which might have done duty in the days of the Stuarts, is worth many a rich sable in the country of the Dogribs and the Loucheaux, and is bartered for skins whose value can be rated at four times their weight in gold; but the gun on the banks of the Thames and the gun in the pine woods of the Mackenzie are two widely different articles.  The old rough flint, whose bent barrel the Indians will often straighten between the cleft of a tree or the crevice of a rock, has been made precious by the labour of many men; by the trackless wastes through which it has been carried; by winter-famine of those who have to vend it; by the years which elapse between its departure from the work shop and the return of that skin of sable or silver-fox for which it has been