kened morsel, they offer it to us as one
would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the
Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was
much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?"
"Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer."
"Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."

We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
delicacies,--beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes
in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.

As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
off his own bat.

Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The _raison d'etre_ of
these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on