clump of poplars on the edge of a large plain on which no tree was visible.  It was piercingly cold, a bitter wind swept across the snow, making us glad to find even this poor shelter against the coming night.  Two hours after dark the thermometer stood at minus 38 degrees, or 70 degrees of frost.  The wood was small and poor; the wind howled through the scanty thicket, driving the smoke into our eyes as we cowered over the fire.  Oh, what misery it was! and how blank seemed the prospect before me! 900 miles still to travel, and to-day I had only made about twenty miles, toiling from dawn to dark through blinding drift and intense cold.  On again next morning over the trackless plain, thermometer at minus 20 in morning, and minus 12 at midday, with high wind, snow, and heavy drift.  One of my men, a half-breed in name, an Indian in reality, became utterly done up from cold and exposure-the others would have left him behind to make his own way through the snow, or most likely to lie down and die, but I stopped the doggs until he came up, and then let him lie on one of the sleds for the remainder of the day.  He was a miserable-looking wretch, but he ate enormous quantities of pemmican at every meal.  After four days of very arduous travel we reached Carlton at sunset on the 12th January.  The thermometer had kept varying between 20 and 38 degrees below zero every night, but on the night of the 12th surpassed any thing I had yet experienced.  I spent that night in a room at Carlton, a room in which a fire had been burning until midnight, nevertheless at daybreak on the 13th the thermometer showed -20 degrees on the table close to my bed.  At half-past ten o’clock, when placed outside, facing north, it fell to -44 degrees, and I afterwards ascertained that an instrument kept at the mission of Prince Albert, 60 miles east from Carlton, showed the enormous amount of 51 degrees below zero at daybreak that morning, 83 degrees of frost.  This was the coldest night during the winter, but it was clear, calm, and fine.  I now determined to leave the usual winter route from Carlton to Red River, and to strike out a new line of travel, which, though very much longer than the trail via Fort Pelly, had several advantages to recommend it to my choice.  In the first place, it promised a new line of country down the great valley of the Saskatchewan River to its expansion into the sheet of water called Cedar Lake, and from thence across the dividing ridge into the Lake Winnipegosis, down the length of that water and its southern neighbour, the Lake Manitoba, until the boundary of the new province would be again reached, fully 700 miles from Carlton.  It was a long, cold travel, but it promised the novelty of tracing to its delta in the vast marshes of Cumberland and the Pasquia, the great river whose foaming torrent I had forded at the Rocky Mountains, and whose middle course I had followed for more than a month of wintry travel.