olution on Great Slave Lake.

With one Indian boy he was crossing the lake on the ice, following in
the wake of a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. The Bishop's dogs
were tired and fell behind. When a storm blew up he lost the trail.
The thermometer was at forty degrees below zero, and the storm was what
Father Lestanc calls a "poudrerie"--that is to say, a storm where the
snow blows up like fine powder. This does not sound unpleasant, but as
an actuality it is, in the extreme North, a sinister snow that bites
your face like driven needles.

The Bishop had no guide but the wind, and when a storm rises the wind
veers. He gave the dogs their head, but even their homing instinct
failed them in the storm and night, so that they crouched on the ice
and howled in unison with the little Indian boy.

At dawn the boy said he smelled smoke, for he was an Indian, and smoke
travels far in the clear, winnowed air of the North.

On looking to the west they sighted land, and after a painful journey
met a dog-train coming toward them with men--the boy's father and
uncle. The priest was celebrating a Mass for the repose of the
Bishop's soul when he arrived, for "Les sauvages," says my informant,
"had declared the Bishop would be frozen to the middle of hees heart.
Ah, leetle Madam! Whom Le Bon Dieu guards are well guarded."

I did not know about this Father Lestanc before. I thought he was
merely an old Oblate Brother passing from the sixth to the seventh
stage of man's little day. Now I know him for one of the outstanding
personalities of the North, and, as such, would do him honour, even I
who am of the world, worldly. I know things about him that happened
years and years ago when this was no man's land. I know how once he
nursed and buried a young man whose companions had abandoned him to die
at Rat Creek, near Portage la Prairie.

The man had gone into the Indian camps against the wishes of his
fellow-teamsters who were travelling from Fort Garry to Fort Charlton.
But he was a gamester, and he went. This was how he contracted
small-pox, and the reason his companions were forced to leave him to
fight death for himself with a little supply of pemmican and some
bannocks as his sole backers. You may not have noticed that the life
of a gamester and the race-horse are short ones in the north-west, but
it is, nevertheless, indubitably true, and this case was no exception
to the rule. His name? I do not know. One forge