and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open water.  Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred moose were killed.  Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever, so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be done with waggons.  “No need to starve here,” says Lilac, “the trout run up to forty pounds each.  There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather berries all the year round.  In summer, I get the red and white currants, raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries, and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries.”

[Illustration:  Three Generations]

Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first circuit of justice through this country.  Although they had come all the way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one case for the judges to try.  The Peace River people seemed somehow to think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had failed to make good.  Some one comforts them with setting forth as the ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket.  Again is Peace River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white kids in stock.  Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of the porcupine.

At Norris’s, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout.  The Dominion Government, with a series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel.  Where the Lesser Slave River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern waterways of delight.  There is frost each night now and the deciduous trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour.  We resurrect from the depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.

Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches our vocabulary.  Judge Noel’s bodyguard is a young stripling of the Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon.  It is always interesting to note the different things of which people are proud.  Old men boast of their age and young ones of their youth.  The fat woman in the side-show is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.  Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan.  This Mounted Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:  “I ‘old the dahnsin’ championship of Edmonton.  I got a gold watch lahst winter for waltzin’.”  We smile approval, and the constable continues, “I waltzed,—­reversin’,—­an ’our-an’-a-’alf!  And—­,” straightening himself up, “I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta.”