This noontide was a fit occasion to make some pleasant harbor, and there read the journal of some voyageur like ourselves, not too moral nor inquisitive, and which would not disturb the noon; or else some old classic, the very flower of all reading, which we had postponed to such a season

     “Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure.”

But, alas, our chest, like the cabin of a coaster, contained only its well-thumbed “Navigator” for all literature, and we were obliged to draw on our memory for these things.

We naturally remembered Alexander Henry’s Adventures here, as a sort of classic among books of American travel.  It contains scenery and rough sketching of men and incidents enough to inspire poets for many years, and to my fancy is as full of sounding names as any page of history,—­Lake Winnipeg, Hudson Bay, Ottaway, and portages innumerable; Chipeways, Gens de Terres, Les Pilleurs, The Weepers; with reminiscences of Hearne’s journey, and the like; an immense and shaggy but sincere country, summer and winter, adorned with chains of lakes and rivers, covered with snows, with hemlocks, and fir-trees.  There is a naturalness, an unpretending and cold life in this traveller, as in a Canadian winter, what life was preserved through low temperatures and frontier dangers by furs within a stout heart.  He has truth and moderation worthy of the father of history, which belong only to an intimate experience, and he does not defer too much to literature.  The unlearned traveller may quote his single line from the poets with as good right as the scholar.  He too may speak of the stars, for he sees them shoot perhaps when the astronomer does not.  The good sense of this author is very conspicuous.  He is a traveller who does not exaggerate, but writes for the information of his readers, for science, and for history.  His story is told with as much good faith and directness as if it were a report to his brother traders, or the Directors of the Hudson Bay Company, and is fitly dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks.  It reads like the argument to a great poem on the primitive state of the country and its inhabitants, and the reader imagines what in each case, with the invocation of the Muse, might be sung, and leaves off with suspended interest, as if the full account were to follow.  In what school was this fur-trader educated?  He seems to travel the immense snowy country with such purpose only as the reader who accompanies him, and to the latter’s imagination, it is, as it were, momentarily created to be the scene of his adventures.  What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date.  When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.