stow them on the native rulers of the soil, the former still constituted my bed, and the latter my pillow, for they were faithfully replaced by the Indians after they had fully satisfied their curiosity. I attributed this to their amiability, and not to any dread of punishment they might have entertained, as their numbers were altogether overpowering, and I judged truly; although I should have considered them quite justified in appropriating them as rightful spoil had they chosen to have done so; for I am egotist enough to believe that I had sufficient magnanimity of mind and character to know and to feel that I stood up in the, till now, almost primeval territory of aboriginal dominion an usurper, and was, together with the motley crew by which I was surrounded, but too painfully emblematic, in my own mind, of the coming misery and eventual, yea, rapid extermination of the race of the Red Man-the valiant children of the riant wilderness.

The natives had quitted the neighbourhood of our encampment before dusk, and we were thus left alone to beguile the flying hours of night as best we could. Our fire well fed with

faggots burn gaily, and every crackle was a sound of welcome companionship. There is nothing like a good log fire for making a man feel at home in the woods.

Although the day had been agreeably hot, we felt the warmth which our "log burner" emitted very comforting, and knowing its effect in scaring off grizzly and other bears, we sunk into the unconscious embrace of slumber with our boots, our revolvers-and with me, my vermilion shirts-under our heads, in the happy confidence of safety. And this was two hundred and eighty miles up the shelving banks of the Frazer River, and adjoining a camp of reported warlike Indians. As for the latter, I would thus as readily trust myself into their power as I would to humanity of the white skin; it is only when the savage becomes morally vitiated by his intercourse with civilisation that his unsophisticated honesty and generosity become obscured or perverted; and when he is driven relentlessly to the brink of death by force of vice and starvation engendered by his association with the white man.

It is a preposterous thing for ignorant con

M

ventional old women, and domesticated men to match, who have never wandered beyond the regions of lamp posts, rant about savages, and pray for the conversion of the heathen, and look down upon them as degraded beings, lost in the darkness of sin and iniquity; when the fact is, that they themselves are the sinful and iniquitous, compared with which the rover of the woods is very often a personification of magnanimity and virtue, while he is never degraded till he has succumbed to the blasting, withering power of a perverted and vicious civilisation, when his valiant courage and sovereign heroism forsakes him, and very soon he is no more. Ashes to ashes.

How much more noble was he than those vassals of civilisation by whom he was overrun, who would cringe into servility, and lick the dust of a petty despotism equally contemptible with themselves.

Give me a free, wild, boundless solitude,

rises to my lips as I write, for I enjoy about as supreme a contempt for anything like ser

vility and social snobbism as any man that ever sniffed the desert air, or ever tasted the sweets of triumphant liberty remote from the haunts of civilized man.

CHAPTER XXI.

A COLD CHOP AND A HOT STEAK.

WE were up and moving soon after day-break; several went off prospecting up river, and for a mile or two inland, if the term may be used to denote an opposite direction to the river. The five-hundred dollar Kentuckian went "hard at it" on a small "bar" of the river, about five hundred yards higher up than where stood the tree under whose shelter he had been delighted with happy dreams, full of delicious prospects, and, to judge by his own vulgar account, perfectly heavenly and inspiring. The Western men set to work cutting down pine