tains, the heart was pressed with sadness: we drank in silence and with swimming eyes.

A pleasant conversation followed this toast, in which each one of our little band exhibited himself in his own way. The Captain was a hearty old Saxon, who had inherited from a thousand generations, a love for home, its hearth and blazing evening fire, its old oaken table, its family arm-chair, and the wife who presided over that temple of holy affections. In him, therefore, we had the genuine spirit of those good old times when man used his physical and mental powers, to build about his heart the structures of positive happiness, instead of the artificial semblances of these, which fashion and affectation draw around the modern home.

Our professor of psalmody was the opposite of this. He had, when the red blood of youth warmed his heart, in the ways of honest nature, spoken sweet things to a lovely girl, won her affections, promised marriage, and as his beard grew became a gentleman; that is, jilted her. He, therefore, was fond of freedom, could not be confined to so plain and quiet a business as the love of one woman, and the care of a family of children." It was quite horrid, indeed it was, for a man who had any music in his soul; the mere idea was concentrated picra to his moral stomach; the thought, bah! that a gentleman could ever think of being a daddy, and trotting on his paternal knee a semi-yearling baby."

Mr. Simpson was from the braes of Scotland. For many years he had lived an isolated and roving life, among the nows, morasses, and lakes of the wilderness, which lies west and north-west of Hudson's Bay. He had been taught his catechism at kirk, and also a proper respect for the ties of the domestic sentiments. But the peculiar idea of manliness which grows up in those winter realms of danger, privation, and loneliness, had gradually habituated him to speak of these relations as desirable mainly when the body had expended its energy in striding mountains, in descending rocky

torrents with boats den with furs, and in the other bold enterprises of these daring traders,

From him we obtained a description of some portions of that vast country occupied by the Hudson's Bay Company; and some information on other topics connected with it. Life in the Company's service was briefly described. Their travelling is performed in various ways at different seasons of the year and in different latitudes. In Oregon their journeys are chiefly made in Mackinaw boats and Indian canoes. With these they ascend and descend the various streams, bearing their cargoes, and often their boats, from the head-waters of one to those of another. In this manner they pass up the Cowelitz and descend the Chihilis with their furs and other goods; thus do they reach the head-waters of the northern fork of the Columbia, pass over the Rocky Mountains, and run down the rivers and lakes to Canada. Farther north on the east side of the Rocky Mountain range, they travel much on foot in summer, and in winter (which is there the greatest part of the year) on sledges drawn by dogs. Ten or twelve of these animals are attached to a light sledge, in which the man sits wrapped in furs and surrounded by meat for his carnivorous steeds and provisions for himself. Thus rigged, the train starts on the hard snow crust, and make eighty or one hundred miles before the dogs tire. When the time for rest comes, they are unharnessed, fed, tied to the bushes or shrubs, and the traveller enveloped in furs, addresses himself to sleep under the lea of a snow-bank or precipitous rock. When nature is recruited the train is again harnessed and put on route. The Aurora Borealis, which flames over the skies of those latitudes, illuminates the country so well, that the absence of the sun during the winter months offers no obstacles to these journeyings. Drawn by dogs over mountain and plain, under heavens filled with electric crackling light, the traveller feels that his situation harmonizes well with the sublime desolation of that wintry zone. In this manner these ad

venturous men travel from the mouth of Mackenzie's river to York on Hudson's Bay and to Canada.

Their dwellings are usually constructed of logs in the form of our frontier cabins. They are generally surrounded by pickets, and in other respects arranged so as to resist any attack which the neighboring savages may make upon them. They are usually manned by an officer of the Company and a few Canadian Frenchmen. In these rude castles, rising in the midst of the frozen north, live the active and fearless gentlemen of the Hudson Bay Company. The frosts of the poles can neither freeze the blood nor the energy of men who spring from the little Island of Britain. The torrid, the temperate, and the frozen zones alike hear the language and acknowledge the power of that wonderful race.

The food of these traders is as rude as their mode of life. At most of the Forts they live almost exclusively on the white and other kinds of fish; no vegetables of any description are obtainable; an occasional deer or woods buffalo or musk ox is procured; but seldom is their fare changed from the produce of the lakes and streams. At a few of their stations not even these can be had; and the company is obliged to supply them with pemican. This is buffalo meat dried, finely pulverized, mixed with fat and service berries, and secured in leathern sacks. They transport this from latitudes forty-eight and nine to different places on Mackenzie's river, and other parts of the extreme north. Wild fowls, geese and ducks afford another means of subsistence. At York and other posts in the neighborhood of lakes, large numbers of these fowl are taken in the summer season, and salted for winter use. But with all their painstaking, these gentlemen live but poorly; on a diet of flesh alone, and that of an indifferent quality. Hardy men are these lords of the snow. Their realm embraces one-ninth of the earth. This immense territory Mr. Simpson informed us has a great variety of surface.

On the north-eastern portion lie extensive tracts of perpetually frozen mountains, cut by narrow valleys filled with

fallen cliffs, among which dash and roar numerous rivers on their way to the frozen sea. Scarcely any timber or other vegetation grows in these wastes. A lonely evergreen or a stunted white birch takes root here and there, and during the few weeks of summer, mosses and linchens present a few verdant spots in the damp recesses of the rocks.. But cold winds, laden with hail and sleet, howl over the budding of every green thing! The flowers can scarcely show their petals and set their seeds, before winter with its cracking ices and falling snow embraces them!

The section of country which lies about Mackensie's river, differs from that described, in having dense forests skirting portions of the valleys, and large plains of moss and linchen, on which feed the deer, buffalo, musk-ox and moose. The river itself is, in summer months, navigable for batteaux several hundred miles. It is well stored with trout, salmon, white and other fish. But the winters there also scarcely end, before they begin freezing land, stream, and sea.

again their work of

The extensive country lying on the head waters of the streams which run northward into the Frozen Ocean, eastward into Hudson's Bay, and southward into the Canadian waters, is composed of swamps, broken at intervals with piles of boulders and minor mountains, and dotted with. clumps of bushes, plots of hassocks, and fields of wild rice. The waters of these table-lands form many lakes and lofty cascades on the way to their several destinations. The roar of these on the dreadful frozen barrenness around, Mr. Simpson represented to be awful in the extreme; so wild, hoarse, and ringing are their echoes..

We are informed that there are considerable tracts of arable land on the western side of Hudson's Bay, occupied by several settlements of Scotch: that these people cultivate nothing but potatoes, oats, barley, and some few garden vegetables; and are altogether in a very undesirable condition. He also informed us of a tract of tillable land,

lying some hundreds of miles northeast of Lake Superior, on which Lord Selkirk had founded a colony; that this settlement contains about three thousand people, composed chiefly of gentlemen and servants, who have retired from the Company's service with their Indian wives and halfbreed children. They cultivate considerable tracts of land, have cattle and horses, schools and churches, a Catholic Bishop and a Protestant preacher of the English Church. Some years since a Mr. McLeod, from this settlement, went to Indiana and purchased a very large drove of sheep for its use. But in driving them a thousand miles over the prairies, their fleeces became so matted with poisonous burrs, that most of them died before reaching their place of destination.

Mr. Simpson related a few incidents of an exploring expedition, which the Company had despatched to the northern coast of America. The unsatisfactory results of those fitted out by the home goverment, under Parry, Franklin, Ross, and Back, which had been partially furnished with men and means by the Company, led it at length to undertake one alone. To this end it despatched, in 1838, one of its officers, accompanied by our friend Simpson's brother, well furnished with men, instruments, and provisions on this hazardous enterprise. I have since been informed, that this Mr. Simpson was a man of great energy and talent-the one indeed on whom the Company relied for the success of the undertaking. From his brother I learned only that the unexplored part of the coast was surveyed, that the waters of Davis' Strait were found to flow with a strong current westward, and enter the Pacific through Behring's Strait; and that Greenland consequently is an island or continent by itself! The Mr. Simpson of this expedition is now known to the civilized world to have trodden the ices and snows, and breathed the frozen air of that horrid shore; and by so doing to have added these great facts to the catalogue of human knowledge; and having become deranged in consequence of his incredible sufferings, to have blown out his own brains on the field of his glorious