f Metz, the investment of Paris, the
tearing up of the Treaty of Paris by the Prussians; and on being
questioned the old man said he had heard at Fort Garry that there was
war, and that England was gaining the day!

To cross with celerity the 700 miles lying between me and Fort Garry
became the chief object of my life. The next morning, with the lightest
of equipment, I started for Cumberland House, the oldest post of the
Hudson Bay Company in the interior. There I obtained, at fabulous
expense, a train of pure Esquimaux dogs, and started on January 31
through a region of frozen swamp for fully 100 miles. On February 7 we
reached Cedar Lake, thence sped on to Lake Winnipegoosis and Shoal Lake,
across a belt of forest to Waterhen River, which carries the surplus
floods of Lake Winnipegoosis to Lake Manitoba, the whole length of which
we traversed, camping at night on the wooded shore, and on February 19
arrived at a mission-house fifty miles from Fort Garry. Not without a
feeling of regret was the old work of tree-cutting, fire-making,
supper-frying, and dog-feeding gone through for the last time.

My mission was accomplished; but in the after-time, 'midst the smoke and
hum of cities, 'midst the prayer of churches, it needs but little cause
to recall again to the wanderer the message of the immense meadows where
far away at the portals of the setting sun lies the Great Lone Land.

The Wild North Land

_I.--From Civilisation to Savagery_

This was Sir William Francis Butler's second book on the
regions and the people of the great Northwest of Canada.
The fascination of the wilderness had got a grip upon him,
and he conveys something of the same fascination to the
reader, whom he allures through the immense and solemn
aisles of the great sub-Arctic forest, makes him a
joint-hunter after the bison on the Great Prairie, or
after the marten and the beaver on the tributary streams
to the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine rivers. The reader
is carried into the fastnesses of the rapidly-disappearing
Red Man in mid-winter, and there are graphic revelations
of the daring deeds of the half-breed descendants of the
white pioneers of the Hudson Bay Company and the
_habitants_ from Lower Canada, who were the great
discoverers and exploiters of the vast country between the
Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, and beyond to the
Pacific. Sir William's story is restrained and convincing,