a few Indians and half-breeds.  It seemed to be my fate to encounter cases of sickness at every post on my return journey.  Here a woman was lying in a state of complete unconsciousness with intervals of convulsion and spitting of blood.  It was in vain that I represented my total inability to deal with such a case.  The friends of the lady all declared that it was necessary that I should see her, and accordingly I was introduced into the miserable hut in which she lay.  She was stretched upon a low bed in one corner of a room about seven feet square; the roof approached so near the ground that I was unable to stand straight in any part of the place; the rough floor was crowded with women squatted thickly upon it, and a huge fire blazed in a corner, making the heat something terrible.  Having gone through the ordinary medical programme of pulse feeling, I put some general questions to the surrounding bevy of women which, being duly interpreted into Cree, elicited the fact that the sick woman had been engaged in carrying a very heavy load of wood on her back for the use of her lord and master, and that while she had been thus employed she was seized with convulsions and became senseless.  “What is it?” said the Hudson Bay man, looking at me in a manner which seemed to indicate complete confidence in my professional sagacity.  “Do you think it’s small-pox?” Some acquaintance with this disease enabled me to state my deliberate conviction that it was not small-pox, but as to what particular form of the many “ills that flesh is heir to” it really was, I could not for the life of me determine.  I had not even that clue which the Yankee practitioner is said to have established for his guidance in the case of his infant patient, whose puzzling ailment he endeavoured to diagnosticate by administering what he termed “a convulsion powder,” being a whale at the treatment of convulsions.  In the case now before me convulsions were unfortunately of frequent occurrence, and I could not lay claim to the high powers of pathology which the Yankee had asserted himself to be the possessor of.  Under all the circumstances I judged it expedient to forego any direct opinion upon the case, and to administer a compound quite as innocuous in its nature as the “soothing syrup” of infantile notoriety.  It was, how ever, a gratifying fact to learn next morning that—­whether owing to the syrup or not, I am not prepared to state the patient had shown decided symptoms of rallying, and took my departure from Battle River with the reputation of being a “medicine-man” of the very first order.

I now began to experience the full toil and labour of a winter journey.  Our course lay across a bare, open region on which for distances of thirty to forty miles not one tree or bush was visible; the cold was very great, and the snow, lying loosely as it had fallen, was so soft that the dogs sank through the drifts as they pulled slowly at their loads.  On the evening of the 10th January we reached a little