r but delivery
was refused by the purchaser."

"They look like good chairs," say I, "what is the matter with them?"

"Matter enough," he continues, "shipped as 'knocked-down' furniture,
four legs to each chair, all of them hind legs. This was a matter of
considerable vexation to the purchaser, who paid cash for the goods and
for their transportation."

"But the furniture house will send the front legs," I argue.

"Might as well try to get blood out of sawdust," says he. Now,
personally, I think this simile is an inconclusive one, for I have
known timbermen to sweat great drops of blood into sawdust, and there
is no reason why those drops could not be extracted.

This freight master is a compelling man, and he says the shippers are
expert sinners and a parcel of ignorant and makeshift people. It may
be he is right: it is not for me to gainsay him, or to further
discompose his temper, when all the evidence is so plainly visible.

After this discussion, I play with the other children who tumble about
on the hillside. They all talk Cree, and some of them who have been to
school talk French and English.

One little girl, with the fine insouciance of eight years, says there
is no use praying _Le Bon Dieu_, for He doesn't understand Cree very
well. She has repeated her prayer over and over but she has never had
a soft-faced doll yet.

Solemn little mother! Her prayer, at any rate, is reasonably specific,
and I can see how one of these days it is going to be answered.

It is good to rest in the shade of the trees while these
copper-coloured babies jabber about me in soft Cree, and finger my hair
and clothes. Truly, I am very fortunate and have much fulness of
pleasure. I might be that same good girl whom an English playwright
describes as having never compromised herself, and yet the wickedest
child who ever was slapped could hardly have had a better time.

CHAPTER XIV

ON THE LESSER SLAVE RIVER

Gitchie Manito, the Mighty,
Mitchie Manito, the bad;
In the breast of every Redman,
In the dust of every dead man,
There's a tiny heap of Gitchie--
And a mighty mound of Mitchie--
There's the good and there's the bad.--CY WARMAN.

From Soto Landing, the Lesser Slave River bends its course to the north
and west till it empties into Lesser Slave Lake at Sawridge. It is a
small river, being about a hundred and fifty feet wide and about thirty
deep. Owing to its sharp curving banks m