place of carts,
and thick buffalo-skin coats of light dress, and stoves were lighted and
windows closed, and the whole face of Nature seemed changed. Sigenok
came to us. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "when I knew you first my heart was
like the great prairie when the fire has passed over it, all black and
foul; now it is white like that field of glittering snow an which we
gaze. I am a Christian; I look with horror on my past life, and things
which I considered before praiseworthy and noble, I now see to be
abominable and vile."

Day after day, in spite of cold and wind and snow, did Sigenok come up
to the missionary's house to receive instruction in the new faith which
had brought such joy to his heart. Many followed in his footsteps, and
there now exists a whole village of Christian Indians in the settlement
who have put away and for ever their medicine men and their charms, and
their false Manitou, and their cruelties and bloodthirstiness, and are
worshippers of the true God in sincerity and simplicity of faith.
Several of the Indian boys brought up at the school have obtained a
considerable amount of learning, and some are ordained ministers of the
gospel, and others catechists and schoolmasters at various missionary
stations scattered throughout the wide extent of Rupert's Land.

You may like to hear something more about that wonderful land, that
_terra incognita_ of British Central America. At the time of which I
have been speaking it was supposed that the only fertile land was to be
found on the banks of the Red River, but it is now ascertained that an
extremely rich and fertile belt extends from the Red River right across
the continent, for eight hundred miles or more, to the base of the Rocky
Mountains, where it unites with the new province of Columbia. This
fertile belt is capable of supporting innumerable herds of cattle,
flocks of sheep, and droves of horses, and of giving employment and
happy homes to millions of the human race. It produces wheat and
barley, and oats, and Indian corn, or maize, in great perfection, and
potatoes and variety of other roots and vegetables of all sorts, and the
finest grass for hay, and hemp and tobacco, and many other plants with
difficulty grown in England. The rivers are fall of fish, and game of
all sorts abound. The climate is very uniform throughout, like that of
Upper Canada-warm in summer and very cold in winter, but dry and healthy
in the extreme.

When, as I hope th