a kind of condensed electric telegraph; but when the question of war was fairly put to him, he gravely replied that at the forts he had heard there was war, and “England,” he added, “was gaining the day.”  This latter fact was too much for me, for I was but too well aware that had war been declared in November, an army organization based upon the Parliamentary system was not likely to have “gained the day” in the short space of three weeks.

To cross with celerity the 700 miles lying between me and Fort Garry Became now the chief object of my life.  I lightened my baggage as much as possible, dispensing with many comforts of clothing and equipment, and on the morn ing of the 23rd January started for Cumberland.  I will not dwell on the seven days that now ensued, or how from long before dawn to verge of evening we toiled down the great silent river.  It was the close of January, the very depth of winter.  With heads bent down to meet the crushing blast, we plodded on, oft times as silent as the river and the forest, from whose bosom no sound ever came, no ripple ever broke, no bird, no beast, no human face, but ever the same great forest-fringed river whose majestic turns bent always to the north-east.  To tell, day after day, the extreme of cold that now seldom varied would be to inflict on the reader a tiresome record; and, in truth, there would be no use in attempting it; 40 below zero means so many things impossible to picture or to describe, that it would be a hopeless task to enter upon its delineation.  After one has gone through the list of all those things that freeze; after one has spoken of the knife which burns the hand that would touch its blade, the tea that freezes while it is being dlrunk, there still remains a sense of having said nothing; a sense which may perhaps be better understood by saying that 40 degrees below zero means just one thing more than all these items—­it means death, in a period whose duration would expire in the hours of a winter’s daylight, if there was no fire or means of making it on the track.

Conversation round a camp-fire in the North-west is limited to one Subject—­dogs and dog-driving.  To be a good driver of dogs, and to be able to run fifty miles in a day with ease, is to be a great man.  The fame of a noted dog-driver spreads far and wide.  Night after night would I listen to the prodigies of running performed by some Ba’tiste or Angus, doughty champions of the rival races.  If Ba’tiste dwelt at Cumberland, I Would begin to hear his name mentioned 200 miles from that place, and his fame would still be talked of 200 miles beyond it.  With delight would I hear the name of this celebrity dying gradually away in distance, for by the disappearance of some oft-heard name and the rising of some new constellation of dog-driver, one could mark a stage of many hundred miles on the long road upon which I was travelling.