eir greeting and fire a volley from their
old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
Circle.

The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,--Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the
first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it?
Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it
is the Arctic Circle!

The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employes a pension
after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.

Reaching the