top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
world.

We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if
this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2 deg. from the North Pole,
which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little
geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
girls--the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
runs,--"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
bottle and a little loaf of bread."

Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And
how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the
girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"

Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every
year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her
the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coa