it joins the Polar Sea?"

This man was the true pioneer, or, rather, the king of pioneers, to whom
Guff gave place without a murmur, for Reuben was a modest man; and the
moment he heard that one of the gentlemen of the Canadian fur-trading
company had taken up his favourite hobby, and meant to work out the
problem, he resolved, as he said, "to play second fiddle," all the more
that the man who thus unwittingly supplanted him was a mountaineer of
the Scottish Highlands.

"It's of no manner of use, you see," he said to Swiftarrow, when
conversing on the subject, "for me to go off on a v'yage o' diskivery
w'en a gentleman like Monsieur Mackenzie, with a good edication an'
scienteefic knowledge and the wealth of a fur company at his back, is
goin' to take it in hand. No; the right thing for Reuben Guff to do in
the circumstances is to jine him an' play second fiddle--or third, if
need be."

Alexander Mackenzie--while seated in the lowly hut of that solitary
outpost poring over his map, trying to penetrate mentally into those
mysterious and unknown lands which lay just beyond him--saw, in
imagination, a great river winding its course among majestic mountains
towards the shores of the ice-laden polar seas. He also saw the lofty
peaks and snow-clad ridges of that mighty range which forms the
back-bone of the American continent, and--again in imagination--passed
beyond it and penetrated the vast wilderness to the Pacific, thus adding
new lands to the British Crown, and opening up new sources of wealth to
the fur company of which he was one of the most energetic members. He
saw all this in imagination, we say, but he did _not_, at that time, see
his name attached to one of the largest American rivers, classed with
the names of the most noted discoverers of the world, and himself
knighted. Still less, if possible, did he see, even in his wildest
flights of fancy, that the book of travels which he was destined to
write, would be translated into French by the order of Napoleon the
First, for the express purpose of being studied by Marshal Bernadotte,
with the view of enabling that warrior to devise a roundabout and
unlooked-for attack on Canada--in rear, as it were--from the region of
the northern wilderness--a fact which is well worthy of record! [See
Appendix for an interesting letter on the subject.]

None of these things loomed on the mind of the modest though romantic
and enterprising man, for at that time he was only