our mouths and dropped them on our
pillows. Being of such an immature age, I laboured under the not
uncommon delusion that to smoke looked manly, and therefore did my best
to accommodate myself to my surroundings, but I failed signally, having
been gifted with a blessed incapacity for tobacco-smoking. This
afflicted me somewhat at the time, but ever since I have been
unmistakably thankful.

But this is wandering. To return.

With a winter of eight months' duration and temperature sometimes at 50
below zero of Fahrenheit, little to do and nothing particular to think
of, time occasionally hung heavy on our hands. With a view to lighten
it a little, I began to write long and elaborate letters to a loving
mother whom I had left behind me in Scotland. The fact that these
letters could be despatched only twice in the year was immaterial.
Whenever I felt a touch of home-sickness, and at frequent intervals, I
got out my sheet of the largest-sized narrow-ruled imperial paper--I
think it was called "imperial"--and entered into spiritual intercourse
with "Home." To this long-letter writing I attribute whatever small
amount of facility in composition I may have acquired. Yet not the
faintest idea of story-writing crossed the clear sky of my unliterary
imagination. I am not conscious of having had, at that time, a love for
writing in any form--very much the reverse!

Of course I passed through a highly romantic period of life--most youths
do so--and while in that condition I made a desperate attempt to tackle
a poem. Most youths do that also! The first two lines ran thus:--

"Close by the shores of Hudson's Bay,
Where Arctic winters--stern and grey--"

I must have gloated long over this couplet, for it was indelibly stamped
upon my memory, and is as fresh to-day as when the lines were penned.
This my first literary effort was carried to somewhere about the middle
of the first canto. It stuck there--I am thankful to say--and, like the
smoking, never went further.

Rupert's Land, at that time, was little known and very seldom visited by
outsiders. During several years I wandered to and fro in it, meeting
with a few savages, fewer white men--servants of the Company--and
becoming acquainted with modes of life and thought in what has been
aptly styled "The Great Lone Land." Hearing so seldom from or of the
outside world, things pertaining to it grew dim and shadowy, and began
to lose interest. In these circumstan