from England in 1783 had precisely the same items as one of 1870.  Strouds, cotton, beads, and trading-guns are still the wants of the Indian, and are still traded for marten and musquash.  In its day Cumberland has had distinguished visitors.  Franklin; in 1819, wintered at the fort, and a sun-dial still stands in rear of the house, a gift from the great explorer.  We buried Joe Miller in the pine-shadowed graveyard near the fort.  Hard work it was with pick and crowbar to prise up the ice-locked earth and to get poor Joe that depth which the frozen clay would seem to grudge him.  It was long after dark when his bed was ready, and by the light of a couple of lanterns we laid him down in the great rest.  The graveyard and the funeral had few of those accessories of the modern mortuary which are supposed to be the characteristics of civilized sorrow.  There was no mute, no crape, no parade—­nothing of that imposing array of hat-bands and horses by which man, even` in the face of the mighty mystery, seeks still to glorify the miserable conceits of life; but the silent snow-laden pine-trees, the few words of prayer read in the flickering light of the lantern, the hush of nature and of night, made accessions full as fitting, as all the muffled music and craped sorrow of church and city.

At Cumberland I beheld for the first time a genuine train of dogs.  There was no mistake about them in shape or form, from fore-goer to hindermost hauler.  Two of them were the pure Esquimaux breed, the bush-tailed, fox-headed, long-furred, clean-legged animals whose ears, sharp-pointed and erect, sprung from a head embedded in thick tufts of woolly hair; Pomeranians multiplied by four; the other two were a curious compound of Esquimaux and Athabascan, with hair so long that eyes were scarcely ’visible.  I had suffered so long from the wretched condition and description of the dogs of the Hudson Bay Company, that I determined to become the possessor of those animals, and, although I had to pay considerably more than had ever been previously demanded as the price of a train of dogs in the North, I was still glad, to get them at any figure.  Five hundred miles yet lay between me and Red River-five hundred miles of marsh and frozen lakes, the delta of the Saskatchewan and the great Lakes Winnipegoosis and Manitoba.

It was the last day of January when I got away from Cumberland with this fine train of dogs and another 2 serviceable set which belonged to a Swampy Indian named Bear, who had agreed to accompany me to Red River.  Bear was the son of the old man whose evolutions with the three pegs had caused so much commotion among the Indians at Red River on the occasion of my visit to Fort Garry eight months earlier.  He was now to be my close companion during many days and nights, and it may not be out of place here to anticipate the verdict of three weeks, and to award him as a voyageur, snow-shoer and camp-maker a place second to none in the long list of my employees.  Soon