cality drained by the streams running into Hudson's Bay, the company's control was obtained by royal licenses, running twenty-one years. Pressure from the settlers who had located on the Red River, and here and there on the Pacific coast, constrained the British Parliament to refuse further contracts after that which expired in 1859, and in that year the fur trade of Canada outside of Rupert's Land was thrown open to the world's competition.

The growing national sentiment, which took shape in 1867 in the organization of most of the provinces of that day into the Dominion of Canada, also incited a desire on the Dominion's part to expand westward and northward. At last the company was induced to surrender all its rights to Rupert's Land, the Canadian government paying it $1,500,000, and allowing it to hold all its posts and ten acres of ground around each of them, as well as permitting it to retain a twentieth of all the land within the fertile belt between the Red River and the Rocky Mountains.

The transfer of Rupert's Land was made to the Dominion in 1870, just two centuries after Charles had granted the charter to Rupert and his associates. While the "Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay" has lost the political power which it wielded for two hundred years over a large part of North America, it still gains a great revenue from the trade in furs, and it shares with the Dominion government in the profits which the sales of lands bring through the extension of the area of settlement.

IV

Where are the champions every one, The Dauphins, the counsellors young and old ?

The barons of Salins, Dol, Dijon,

Vienne, Grenoble? They all are cold. Or take the folk under their banners enrolledPursuivants, trumpeters, heralds (hey! How they fed of the fat and the flagon trolled!) The wind has carried them all away. VOL. 103-NO. 3

Where are the fairs and the festivals which began back in the spacious times of Louis XIV, at which hundreds of Indians from the interior lakes and rivers, decked out in war-paint and eagle-feathers, and scores of gayly attired forest rangers, gathered every July at Montreal and Three Rivers to barter the stores of furs collected during the previous winter for powder, bullets, traps, knives, and trinkets and garish finery for the squaws back in the wilderness awaiting the return of their red and white mates, and made the long days and the short nights at these trysting-places resound with their carousals?

What has become of the annual summer promenades of the "lords of the lakes and the forests" from Montreal, in their immense canoes, each manned by a dozen voyageurs, along the St. Lawrence and the lakes to the rendezvous at Fort William, and the wild welcome which greeted them there from their hundreds of savage retainers, red and white,-and the councils which they held there with their dozen or two dozen partners of the wilderness, in which they received reports of the work done in the previous twelve months and marked out the plan of campaign for the coming year,-and the days and nights of feasting, song, and revelry at the close of these gatherings,— and the rollicking songs of the voyageurs, as they sent their canoes speeding out from their mooring-places and started on their homeward journey to Montreal,and the clamorous salutes from the shore by the Indians and the coureurs de bois as, bidding farewell to their patrons, they dispersed into the forest to make their way back to their hunting and trapping fields on the Severn, the Saskatchewan, and the Athabasca ?

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Along the routes on rivers and lakes traversed by the sultans of the fur trade of the old days, steamboats now carry their millions of passengers and their tens of millions of tons of grain, lumber, cop

per, iron ore, coal, and other products every year. Through and around St. Mary's River, the rapids of which were an obstruction to the trappers and Indian traders from St. Lusson's days onward, now flows a commerce, in the seven months of the open season, three times as great as that through the Suez Canal in the twelve months of the year. The locomotive dashes along the trails blazed by Mackenzie, Mackay, Frazer, and Thompson. On spots on the portages across which Verandrye carried his canoes bustling towns have risen. Winnipeg, with 75,000 inhabitants, the largest of Canada's cities except Montreal and Toronto, has been built on the site of the old Hudson's Bay Company's trading-post of Fort Garry, at the junction of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North.

"The inroads of civilization must inevitably drive the fur-bearing animals from their present pastures, though probably for many years to come the average collections will be fairly well maintained. Ultimately some of these animals must meet the fate of the buffalo." These were the words of Commissioner C. C. Chipman, the resident head of the Hudson's Bay Company, spoken to the writer of this article at the company's headquarters in Winnipeg a few months ago.

But not all the color, the glitter, and the gayety of the old forest life have departed. Although steamboats start out on the Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, and the Mackenzie, as soon as the ice leaves those streams in June or July, and carry supplies to the posts and collect the furs which are gathered there, down their tributaries still sail the canoe brigades, and from the far interior points come the dogsleds or the ox-team caravans, as of old. The same animals are trapped as in the earlier day, with the same tools and in the same way.

At Edmonton, on the Saskatchewan, which is touched by the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk, and the Canadian Northern railways, and which is the largest fur-collecting depot in the world,

with electric lights and all the appliances of a present-day city, the Indian and the white or mixed-breed forest-rover are familiar sights, and the eighteenth century jostles the twentieth.

Lovers of the earth's great open spaces can still be gratified in Canada. Residents or visitors at Edmonton see a mail carrier leave there on horseback for furtrading posts in the far north, delivering his missives at Fort Chippewayan (where he discards his horses and takes to Esquimaux dog-sleds), on Lake Athabasca, at Fort Resolution, near Great Slave Lake, at Fort Franklin, on Great Bear Lake, and other points up to Fort McPherson, near where the Peel River empties into the Mackenzie, the northernmost post of the Hudson's Bay Company, several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle and 1950 miles north of Edmonton, the journey each way consuming three months.

For ages to come the valleys of the Nelson, Churchill, Mackenzie, and Yukon, will be the home of the trapper and the hunter. Over 300 buffaloes are roaming the prairies west and southwest of Great Slave Lake, between the Peace and the Liard rivers, the largest number of bison in their wild state still extant, the next largest number being the twenty-five in our Yellowstone Park. The

Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near and the daylight's past, of Moore's" Canadian Boat Song" can still be heard by summer excursionists on Lake Winnipeg and Lake Athabasca, and the song bears a little, at least, of the suggestiveness which it carried in its earlier days.

The Hudson's Bay Company is selling more furs in 1908 than it ever did in the days of its monopoly. Its 250 factories, or collection stations, stretch from Labrador to and through British Columbia and the province of Yukon to the borders of Alaska, and it carries on its rolls an army of employees, white and red. In 1907 its profits, in excess of all its vast outlay, approximated $2,500,000, more than

half of which was from land sales. There is no need for surprise that its shares, of the nominal value of $50, sell for $400 on the London market. Its greatest competitors in the Canadian field are the Revillon Brothers, a corporation with a capital of $15,000,000, which was established back in 1723, which has its general headquarters at Paris, which has branches and collection and distribution offices at London, Leipzig, Moscow, Bokhara, Shanghai, Montreal, Edmonton, New York, and other places, and which operates extensively all over the

world, but which did not establish itself in a large way in Canada until about a dozen years ago. The Hudson's Bay Company and Revillon Brothers each has two steamers plying between Hudson's Bay and Europe.

From a statement of Canada's exports of furs (of furs dressed and undressed, of furs produced by fish or marine animals, and of furs in the various stages of manufacture), kindly furnished to me by F. C. T. O'Hara, of the Department of Trade and Commerce at Ottawa, the following table for recent years is made up:

The sea-otter and the seal are, at this moment, rapidly diminishing, a fact which accounts for the falling off in Canada's exportation of the skins of marine animals. In every other item in the list here cited, and also in the aggregate, there is an increase. And this statement does not cover the furs which remain for use in Canada, an item which, in the colder regions of that country, must amount to a large figure.

Vastness, color, movement, blend in the pageant of the fur trade as it unfolds itself in the great open spaces of the northern land. Speeding in and out of the straits and the bay, from June to September, the vessels of the Hudson's Bay Company deal with larger constituencies, red and white, than they dealt with in the

past. At the council board of the Adventurers in Leadenhall Street, London, in these days of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, greater sums of money are divided than his predecessors, Rupert, Marlborough, and the Duke of York, ever

saw.

Over in British Columbia, just below Alaska's southern projection, as these lines are being written, Boston landscape architects are laying out the town of Prince Rupert, the coming ocean terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific. We are thus carried back in memory to the Boston skipper Gillam, who, at Rupert's River, laid the foundation of Rupert's Land; 1908 is linked with 1668, and the gulf between Edward VII and Charles II is bridged.

ONSLOW PERRY sat in the dusty, booklined office of the Flywheel Publishing Company, his hand half-concealingly, half-protectingly on a letter he had just finished, and looked across the table at the soft-coal fire burning in the rusted grate. The Flywheel had selected an old house, falling into decay, in a quarter of the town forsaken by the sort of residents that had built it up grandly more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The mantels were so good, both sponsors of the Flywheel said gravely when they were chaffed about gravitating to the slums. So they put the house into fitting repair, and ceased to take any after-notice of it so far as dust and cobwebs went; they affected the attitude of leaving it to itself, to grow ancient again. There Dickerman, the editor and publisher, and Perry, his subordinate, received manuscript and made up the magazine. They had swallowed the house whole, it was said, for they also lived there and skirmished about, from inconsiderable eating-houses on their lean days to gilded cafés when their pockets ran over.

It was matter for amazement in a time when new magazines spring up and flourish briefly, that the Flywheel in particular should have sold; but even at first it did, and the wise declared they knew the reason. Dickerman was buying the most expensive and splendid contributors with his father's money, though he had the whim of making them publish anonymously. Dickerman himself, known in college as Crazy Ike, Dotty Dick, and half a dozen titles to the same shading and effect, could scarcely contain himself when the circulation ran unhaltingly up. It was, he felt, a personal tribute. He had planned the whole thing, and it was true that he had put his father's money into

it, after coaxings colored by sanguine prophecies absurdly contrasted with his resultant surprise at their fulfillment. But there, at a good figure, the circulation hung. It could not be whipped or spurred, nor did it drop very startlingly below that first buoyant figure.

Dickerman was a favorite among his mates, and he had an enormous acquaintance. Perry, too, owned a vogue of another sort. Men who were not of their own kind, brokers, grave professional workers, or gamblers on the scent of money, having met the two at clubs and laughed at their stories, their wild play of imagination, and antiphonal abuse of each other, cherished a lively curiosity to see what they would say when they really had a medium like the Flywheel. The two men together were possessed of a trick of augmenting each other, to the general mirth; and the absent, who happened not to be creditors, always thought of them to the accompaniment of a smile.

Perry, who sat at the table, arms relaxed and face wistfully puckered, hardly looked like a ministrant to gayety. He was sinewy, and light of hair and eyes, six feet tall, with good broad shoulders and a swing and dash that made the ladies look at him demurely. His thick hair tumbled over his forehead in a blowzy way, because he rumpled it when the world went ill. To the casual eye, he was a handsome, virile animal, with no lines permanent enough as yet to tell careless tales. The time would come when, unless he hardened his face by the repeated hammer-strokes that mould and change, some one would see a blenching of the eye, when his more decided intimates called upon him to do or leave undone,a sensitive quiver of the mouth.

The door from the inner office opened,

and Dickerman came in. He was shortlegged, and cushiony in the shoulders, absurdly fat, with round eyes staring behind large horn-bowed spectacles. His hair stood straight up from his forehead in bristles aggressively cultivated. The frown also was a part of his equipment, lest the world should misprize him for the plumpness thrust upon him. He threw a manuscript on the table.

"Read that," said he.

"When I have time," Perry answered, as if he did not propose to use the time he had, at call.

"You've got time now. It's only four thousand words. Want to talk to you about it."

Perry only leaned back in his chair, and gazed thoughtfully at Dickerman, who, knowing this mood in him, affected not to recognize it, and sought about among the effects on the table, whistling cheerily. But he was of the nature that, having something to say, cannot defer it. "I'm going to just electrify you, Perry," he burst forth. "They're on to us." "Who are?"

"Everybody. They will be by day after to-morrow. I met Hunkins on the ferry, and he could n't contain himself. Said he'd discovered how we made the Flywheel so distinctive. Said he found five or six old numbers on the hotel table where he'd been to interview the mill-hands. Said he read 'em consecutively. Said he guessed the whole thing."

Perry was looking at him with a gravity that seemed to indicate an issue very bad indeed.

"What did you say?" he inquired. Asked him what he meant."

64

66

Well," said Perry. He took up a pencil and began drawing whorls and circles with a clever hand. He had a certain facility in everything. At one time, when he was an intimate of an artistic set in college, there had been an impression that he was going to work miracles as a draughtsman of some sort.

Dickie began to grin. He had a wide mouth and beautiful teeth.

"I almost told him how I did it,” he said, with a chuckling appreciation of his own folly.

"Told him how you invented the Flywheel?"

"Yes. It tickled me so I thought I'd have to."

"Fool," said Perry indulgently.

"I saw myself lying there - I was in bed, you know bed, you know- and thinking how it's only discovery that counts. After anybody's found a new way of doing something or other, there'll be plenty of fellows that can do the trick as well as he can, or better. But he caught it while it was rushing by, and labeled it, and it stands in the museum in his name."

"Yes, I know all that. You said that when you came to rope me in. You reeled it off, and I knew it was a monologue you'd got up for the boys; and then you sprung it on me that you were going to start a magazine."

"With anonymous contributions."
"Which I was to write."

66

Because you I could write 'em. If I could have done it, do you s'pose I'd have summoned anybody else from the vasty deep?"

"Never mind whether you would or would n't. Anyhow, I've done it. I've ground you out an imitation of Kipling and an imitation of Shaw, and all the whole blooming push, and when you've given 'em a good plausible title and put 'em in without a name, blessed if the wise can tell whether it is n't Kipling and Shaw."