of good-will from the Gordon garden,
radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.

Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for--a
Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another
guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
growing things.

[Illustration: The Steamer _Grahame_]

Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats,
weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen
scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_
has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real
dishes, and best of all, a bath!

On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as
faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see