wind sweeping up the long reaches of the river; nothing spoken, for such cold makes men silent, morose, and savage.  After four hours travelling, we stopped to dine.  It was only 9:30, but we had breakfasted six hours before.  We were some time before we could make fire, but at length it was set going, and we piled the dry driftwood fast upon the flames.  Then I set up my thermometer again; it registered 39 below zero, 71 degrees of frost.  What it must have been at day break I cannot say; but it was sensibly colder than at ten o’clock, and I do not doubt must have been 45 below zero.  I had never been exposed to any thing like this cold before.  Set full in the sun at eleven o’clock, the thermometer rose only to 26 below zero, the sun seemed to have lost all power of warmth; it was very low in the heavens, the day being the shortest in the year; in fact, in the centre of the river the sun did not show above the steep south bank, while the wind had full sweep from the north-east.  This portion of the Saskatchewan is the farthest north reached by the river in its entire course.  It here runs for some distance a little north of the 51th parallel of north latitude, and its elevation above the sea is about 1801 feet.  During the whole day we journeyed on, the wind still kept dead against us, and at times it was impossible to face its terrible keenness.  The dogs began to tire out; the ice cut their feet, and the white surface was often speckled with the crimson icicles that fell from their wounded toes.  Out of the twelve dogs composing my cavalcade, it would have been impossible to select four good ones.  Coffee, Tete Noir, Michinass, and another whose name I forget, underwent repeated whalings at the hands of my driver, a half-breed from Edmonnton named Frazer.  Early in the afternoon the head of Tete Noir was reduced to shapeless pulp from tremendous thrashings.  Michinass, or the “Spotted One,” had one eye wherewith to watch the dreaded driver, and coffee had devoted so much strength to wild lurches and sudden springs in order to dodge the descending whip, that he had none whatever to bestow upon his legitimate toil of hauling me.  At length, so useless did he become, that he had to be taken out altogether from the harness and left to his fate on the river.  “And this,” I said to myself, “is dog-driving; this inhuman thrashing and varied cursing, this frantic howling of dogs, this bitter, terrible cold is the long-talked of mode of winter travel!” To say that I was disgusted and stunned by the prospect of such work for hundreds of Miles would be-only to speak a portion of what I felt.  Was the cold always to be so crushing? were the dogs always to be the same wretched creatures?  Fortunately, no; but it was only when I reached Victoria that night, long after dark, that I learned that the day had been very exceptionally severe, and that my dogs were unusually miserable ones.

As at Edmonton so in the fort at Victoria the small-pox had again broken out; in spite of cold and frost the infection still lurked in many places, and in none more fatally than in this little settlement where, during the autumn, it had wrought so much havoc among the scanty community.  In this distant settlement I spent the few days of Christmas; the weather had become suddenly milder, although the thermometer still stood below zero.