da. We were
buried, so to speak, in the heart of the great northern wilderness. Our
nearest neighbour lived in an outpost between one and two hundred miles
distant, similar to our own in all respects but even more lonely, being
in charge of a certain Scotsman named Macnab, whose army of occupation
consisted of only six men and two Indian women! The forests around us
were not peopled. Those vast solitudes were indeed here and there
broken in upon, as it were, by a few families of wandering Red-Indians,
who dwelt in movable tents--were here to-day and away to-morrow--but
they could not be said to be peopled, except by deer and bears and foxes
and kindred spirits.

Of course, therefore, we were far beyond the every day influences of
civilised life. We had no newspapers, no mails; no communication
whatever, in short, with the outer world except twice in the year. The
one occasion was in summer, when a brigade of boats arrived with our
outfit of goods for the year's trade with the few scattered Indians
above referred to; the other occasion was in the depth of our apparently
interminable winter, when a packet of letters was forwarded from outpost
to outpost throughout the land by the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company
which we served.

This half-yearly interval between mails had a double effect on our
minds. In the first place, it induced a strange feeling that the great
world and all its affairs were things of the past, with which we had
little or nothing to do--a sort of dream--and that the little world of
our outpost, with its eight or ten men and three or four Indian women,
its hunting, and trapping, and firewood-cutting, and fishing, and
trading, and small domestic arrangements and dissensions, was the one
place of vital importance and interest, before which empires and
dynasties and the trifling matter of politics sank into mere
insignificance! In the second place, it created an intense longing--a
hungering and thirsting--for news of our kindred "at home."

Our chief, Mr Strang, and our two selves, with another fellow-clerk who
was named Spooner, as well as most of our men, were from "the old
country," where we had left fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters--in some
cases sweethearts--behind us. It may be conceived then with what
anxiety and yearning we looked forward to the periodical break in the
weary six months of total silence that had enveloped us. Men in
civilised, or even semi-civilised communities, c