-not princes and millionaire, who buy
silver fox and sea otter--but you and me and the rest of us whose
object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that
one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since
1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the
fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game--save in the year of the
unexplained rabbit pest--shows no sign of diminishing.

Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would
ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is
the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall
erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.

To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer,
"Poor--poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and
wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not
make that answer.

To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost
exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world,
especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws
prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea
otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.

"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The
oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.

V

I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been
written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks
in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the
man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who
goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia
with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though
I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their
own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the
romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been
penned of the company since it was established away back in the year
1670.

Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who
thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train
for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have
never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her
a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged