The life of the bath is a closed book to most people. A great deal has been written ab pat the life of the wild animals that faroish the far; bat very little has been written about the life of the traders and trappers, who collect it, th often appears on the surface one of bitter trial and hardship. The Indian trapper often goes through trials and hardships that woold crash another mao. He goes off in the antamn to his winter's hanting grounds with single small canoe; be sleeps all winter in a bark tepee or in a canvas tent, mhen he does not roll ap in his rabbit skin in the snow; he travels through the bash whea the mercury is frozen in the glass, satow-shoeing, with his pack pon his back, and his rife on his arm—throogh windfall and through te gled swamp, and worst of all throogb perilous burnt bush, where a wilderness of charred poles sways in the wind like the masts of countless ships, Comfort is thing he knows not. He lives on pork and beans, and flour and tea. His clothes he never changes, His only remedy for all flesh is heir to, is " drink of burning Painkiller. He lives and dies in debt, and would not become solvent if he could. A good winter may bring him in £100; a bad winter £10, On the whole, ife is that of Hobbes' oatoral man, poor, mean, british, and short." But on the other band, he is quite content. He does not feel the need of comfort or s balance in solitude, where are the charms That sages have eeen in thy face Better dwell la the midst of alarms Than dwell in this horrible piaes,"
And yet he himeelf was the first to confess that anyone who had tasted the life of the bush, could not go back another." Once a Hadeon Bay map, be eaid, "always a Hodeon Bay man. There is a fatal fascination about the free life of the forest that claims a man captive. Sach a one has heard the call of the wild. To ply the paddle, to shoot the wild dock, to hit the trail cross the virgin bosh, to sleep beneath the stars, to breathe the ecent of cedar or of pine—theso things are life to bim bose blood has caught the fever.
OPPOSITION, The labours of the traders are not arduous, They have to sell trappera their outfits in the autumn; and they barter for the peltries in the spring. They have to sort the peltries that boy, and transport them by cance or dog-train to the nearest railway line or steamboat wharf; and there their daties cod, The only time when cause for worry, is when they have to meet with opposition. Then they have to fight for very life, When the North-West Company set up against the Hudeon Bay men in the beginning of last contrary, there was " bitter fight in which trading-poste wore burned, and men were kidnapped, and often blood was split. The methods of warfare now adopted are those of commercial aggresmn; and they are directed mainly what called "free traders "—free-I who beside the H.B. C stoical and les him to be gode may sead. He may always get, he argues, credit with the traders, Why, then, should he take thought for the morrow, what he shoald eat, or what he should pat on?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.