Fort-a-la-Corne lies some twenty miles below the point of junction of the rivers.  Towards Fort-a-la-Corne I bent my steps with a strange anxiety, for at that point I was to intercept the “Winter Express” carrying from Red River its burden of news to the far-distant forts of the Mackenzie River.  This winter packet had left Fort Garry in mid-December, and travelling by way of Lake Winnipeg, Norway House and Cumberland, was due at Fort-a-la-Corne about the 21st January.  Anxiously then did I press on to the little fort, where I expected to get tidings of that strife whose echoes during the past month had been powerless to pierce the solitudes of this lone land.  With tired dogs whose pace no whip or call could accelerate, we reached the fort at midday on the 21st.  On the river, ’close by, an old Indian met us.  Has the packet arrived?  “Ask him if the packet has come,” I said.  He only stared blankly at me and shook his head.  I had forgotten, what was the packet to him? the capture of a musk-rat was of more consequence than the capture of Metz.  The packet had not come, I found when we reached the fort, but it was hourly expected, and I determined to await its arrival.

Two days passed away in wild storms of snow.  The wind howled dismally through the pine woods, but within the logs crackled and flew, and the board of my host was always set with moose steaks and good things, although outside, and far down the river, starvation had laid his hand heavily upon the red man.  It had fallen dark some hours on the evening of the 22nd January when there came a knock at the door of our house; the raised latch gave admittance to an old travel-worn Indian who held in his hand a small bundle of papers.  He had cached the packet, he said, many miles down the river, for his dogs were utterly tired out and unable to move; he had come on himself with a few papers for the fort:  the snow was very deep to Cumberland.  He had been eight days in travelling 200 miles; he was tired and starving, and white with drift and storm.  Such was his tale.  I tore open the packet—­it was a paper of mid-November.  Metz had surrendered; Orleans been retaken; Paris, starving, still held out; for the rest, the Russians had torn to pieces the Treaty of Paris, and our millions and our priceless blood had been spilt and spent in vain on the Peninsula of the Black Sea—­perhaps, after all, we would fight?  So the night drew itself out, and the pine-tops began to jag the horizon before I ceased to read.

Early on the following morning, the express was hauled from its cache and brought to the fort; but it failed to throw much later light upon the meagre news of the previous evening.  Old Adam was tried for verbal intelligence, but he too proved a failure.  He had carried the packet from Norway House on Lake Winnipeg to Carlton for more than a score of winters, and, from the fact of his being the bearer of so much news in his lifetime, was looked upon by his compeers as