s chair and began to pace
nervously about the room.

I mentioned having met Bishop Tache in St. Paul and the letter which I
had received from him. He read it attentively and commenced to speak
about the Expedition.

"Had I come from it?"

"No; I was going to it."

He seemed surprised.

"By the road to the Lake of the Woods?"

"No; by the Winnipeg River," I replied.

"Where was the Expedition?"

I could not answer this question; but I concluded it could not be very
far from the Lake of the Woods.

"Was it a large force?"

I told him exactly, setting the limits as low as possible, not to deter
him from fighting if such was his intention. The question uppermost in
his mind was one of which he did not speak, and he deserves the credit of
his silence. Amnesty or no amnesty was at that moment a matter of very
grave import to the French half-breeds, and to none so much as to their
leader. Yet he never asked if that pardon was an event on which he could
calculate. He did not even allude to it at all.

At one time, when speaking of the efforts he had made for the advantage
of his country, he grew very excited, walking hastily up and down the
room with theatrical attitudes and declamation, which he evidently
fancied had the effect of imposing on his listener; but, alas! for the
vanity of man, it only made him appear ridiculous; the mocassins sadly
marred the exhibition of presidential power.

An Indian speaking with the solemn gravity of his race looks right manful
enough, as with moose-clad leg his mocassined feet rest on prairie grass
or frozen snow-drift; but this picture of the black-coated Metis playing
the part of Europe's great soldier in the garb of a priest and the shoes
of a savage looked simply absurd. At length M. Riel appeared to think he
had enough of the interview, for stopping in front of me he said,

"Had I been your enemy you would have known it be fore. I heard you would
not visit me, and, although I felt humiliated, I came to see you to show
you my pacific inclinations."

Then darting quickly from the room he left me. An hour later I left the
dirty ill-kept fort. The place was then full of half-breeds armed and
unarmed. They said nothing and did nothing, but simply stared as I drove
by. I had seen the inside of Fort Garry and its president, not at my
solicitation but at his own; and now before me lay the solitudes of the
foaming Winnipeg and the pathless waters of great inland seas.

It was