in scenes of travel or adventure in the great
unbroken regions sought out by the fur trade, their retentive memories
reproducing by the winter fireside or summer camp pictures so graphic as
to commend themselves to every ear.

The tender heart and true of the brave old knight, Sir Thomas More, put
a ban upon hunting in his Utopia. Alas and alack for the wayward
proclivities of our Utopians, predaceous creatures all, hunting was to
them as the breath of their nostrils, for to them, unlike the sons of
Adam, it was given--with their brothers resting upon the tranquil
river--to lay upon the altar of their homes alike the fruits of the
earth and the spoils of the chase.

THE BUFFALO HUNT.

What pen can paint the life of the "Chasseurs of the Great Plains," tell
of the gathering of the mighty Halfbreed clan going forth--each spring
and fall--in a tumult of carts and horsemen to their boundless
preserves, the home of the buffaloes, whose outrangers were the grizzly
bear, the branching elk, the flying antelope that skirted the great
columns, the last relieving the heavy rolling gait of the herds by a
speed and airy flight that mocked the eye to follow them, scouting the
dull trot of the prowling wolves--attent upon the motions of their best
purveyor--man.

What a going forth was theirs! this array of Hunters, with their wives
and little ones; this new tribe clad in semi-savage garniture, streaming
across the plains with cries of glee and joyance; the riders in their
"travoie" of arms and horse equipment--the vast "brigade" of carts and
bands of following horses, kept to the cavalcade by those reckless
jubilants--the boys--seeming a part of the creatures they bestrode. The
sunshine and the flying fleecy clouds, emulous in motion with the troop
below: what life was in it all; what freedom and what breadth!

And as the sun sank apace and the guides and Headmen rode apart on some
o'er-looking height and reined their cattle in, the closing up of the
flying squadron for the evening camp, the great circular camp of these
our Scythians proof against sudden raid crowning the landscape far and
wide, seen, yet seeing every foe, whose subtle coming through the
short-lived night was watched by eyes as keen as were their own.

When reached, their bellowing, countless quarry: the plain alive and
trembling with their tumult, what tournament of mail-clad knights but
was as a stilted play to this rude shock of man and beast--carrying in