d vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
record.

It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
we were following his description of a Canadian winter.

Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast
amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents
printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material,
and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme
covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English
beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were
diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival
interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to
the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different
ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so
inwrought with the documentary history and th