he Forks of the Mackenzie."

Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,

[Illustration: Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson]

"I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
the body to admit the spirits to the intestines."

Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
tickles my fancy.

I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
conception of what a modicum of rum or "strong spirit