endent; Sergeants Sweetapple, Raven, Fitzgerald and Hertzog
became Inspectors; while two excellent officers, Inspector John Taylor,
son of Sir Thomas Taylor, Chief Justice of Manitoba, and Inspector
Church, the famous riding master, were called by death.

Superintendent Cortlandt Starnes gives a rather chilling picture of the
Mounted Police surroundings at Fort Churchill where the weather
indicator was for months hitting the bottom of the thermometer bulb, and
where there was a general monotony in surroundings. He says, "The place
is a dreary one, and there is nothing in the way of recreation for the
men except reading and no place to go except the Hudson's Bay post and
the English Church mission on a Sunday." This is a good tribute to the
self-sacrifice of the missionary. Starnes goes on to say, "There was a
gramophone, but it is broken and out of order. The mess-room is a cold
and forbidding place." Starnes has a good appreciation of the value of
some cheerful environment for his men, for he says, "I have had some
chairs put up instead of the long benches, and I have requisitioned for
a few pictures to put on the walls. I would also like to have the tin
plates and cups replaced by the ordinary white crockery, or crockery of
a cheap standard pattern." Starnes is not extravagant in his
requisition. Canada is a rich country, and these men holding her lonely
outposts deserve consideration, but some picayune arm-chair censor may
cut things out, and so the Superintendent goes warily, but he will not
desist altogether because he knows the place better than the censor, and
he knows that his men should have some reasonable comforts. "A small
billiard table," he says, "and some additional books and magazines would
be acceptable. The library is well patronized, but in a year's time the
most of its books will have been read." A year is quite a while to wait
for a mail. It was at a post something like this one that one early
Hudson's Bay Company official heard of the Battle of Waterloo a year
after it happened. But he held a celebration even then, for were not
these grim old traders men of British stock who were holding a new
Empire for the British Crown? Of course, things were improving since the
advent of the Mounted Police, for they had instituted what Inspector
Jennings facetiously called a "rural mail delivery" through regions near
the Pole. Jennings himself and his men had patrolled through snow and
ice very extensively that