elder men by drawing a chair up to
the company of McTavishes and Frobishers and McGillivrays and MacKenzies
and other retired veterans of the north country.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said I, "what were you saying to Colonel
Adderly?"

"Talk of your military conquests, Sir," my uncle continued, "Why, Sir,
our men have transformed a wilderness into an empire. They have blazed a
path from Labrador on the Atlantic to that rock on the Pacific, where my
esteemed kinsman, Sir Alexander MacKenzie, left his inscription of
discovery. Mark my words, Sir, the day will come when the names of David
Thompson and Simon Fraser and Sir Alexander MacKenzie will rank higher
in English annals than Braddock's and----"

"Egad!" laughed the officer, amused at my uncle, who had been a leading
spirit in the North-West Company and whose enthusiasm knew no bounds,
"Egad! You gentlemen adventurers wouldn't need to have accomplished much
to eclipse Braddock." And he paused with a questioning supercilious
smile. "Sir Alexander was a first cousin of yours, was he not?"

My uncle flushed hotly. That slighting reference to gentlemen
adventurers, with just a perceptible emphasis of the _adventurers_, was
not to his taste.

"Pardon me, Sir," said he stiffly, "you forget that by the terms of
their charter, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company have the
privilege of being known as gentlemen adventurers. And by the Lord, Sir,
'tis a gentleman adventurer and nothing else, that stock-jobbing
scoundrel of a Selkirk has proved himself! And he, sir, was neither
Nor'-Wester, nor Canadian, but an Englishman, like the commander of the
Citadel." My uncle puffed out these last words in the nature of a
defiance to the English officer, whose cheeks took on a deeper purplish
shade; but he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.

"Nonsense, MacKenzie, my good friend," laughed he patronizingly, "if the
Right Honorable, the Earl of Selkirk, were such an adventurer, why the
deuce did the Beaver Club down at Montreal receive him with open mouths
and open arms and----"

"And open hearts, Sir, you may say," interrupted my Uncle MacKenzie.
"And I'd thank you not to 'good-friend' me," he added tartly.

Now, the Beaver Club was an organization at Nor'-Westers renowned for
its hospitality. Founded in 1785, originally composed of but nineteen
members and afterwards extended only to men who had served in the _Pays
d'En Haut_, it soon acquired a reputation