library indicates at once the reading man and the clever artificer.  Scientific works of reference, good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and human-nature, for five long months.  The office furniture, hand-made of native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson’s individual work in both design and execution.  Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any one in the settlement, whether fort employe or not, who cares to come in here for a quiet hour to read.

Kipling says, “You couldn’t pack a Broadwood half a mile,” but the Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line.  In a corner of the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history.  The honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton.  It carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London.  Mrs. Wilson tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.  The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.

Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B.  Co., has put in a life of loving service among the people of Vermilion.  Her knowledge of medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.  These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly kindness.

Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper.  The country furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies whose four constituents—­flour, lard, butter and fruit—­are products of the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild game—­moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs, and mallards.  Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry, blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon.  The salt comes from Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion