zed
in a corner, making the heat something terrible. Having gone through the
ordinary medical programme of pulse feeling, I put some general
questions to the surrounding bevy of women which, being duly interpreted
into Cree, elicited the fact that the sick woman had been engaged in
carrying a very heavy load of wood on her back for the use of her lord
and master, and that while she had been thus employed she was seized with
convulsions and became senseless. "What is it?" said the Hudson Bay man,
looking at me in a manner which seemed to indicate complete confidence in
my professional sagacity. "Do you think it's small-pox?" Some
acquaintance with this disease enabled me to state my deliberate
conviction that it was not small-pox, but as to what particular form of
the many "ills that flesh is heir to" it really was, I could not for the
life of me determine. I had not even that clue which the Yankee
practitioner is said to have established for his guidance in the case of
his infant patient, whose puzzling ailment he endeavoured to
diagnosticate by administering what he termed "a convulsion powder,"
being a whale at the treatment of convulsions. In the case now before me
convulsions were unfortunately of frequent occurrence, and I could not
lay claim to the high powers of pathology which the Yankee had asserted
himself to be the possessor of. Under all the circumstances I judged it
expedient to forego any direct opinion upon the case, and to administer a
compound quite as innocuous in its nature as the "soothing syrup" of
infantile notoriety. It was, how ever, a gratifying fact to learn next
morning that--whether owing to the syrup or not, I am not prepared to
state the patient had shown decided symptoms of rallying, and took my
departure from Battle River with the reputation of being a "medicine-man"
of the very first order.

I now began to experience the full toil and labour of a winter journey.
Our course lay across a bare, open region on which for distances of
thirty to forty miles not one tree or bush was visible; the cold was very
great, and the snow, lying loosely as it had fallen, was so soft that the
dogs sank through the drifts as they pulled slowly at their loads. On the
evening of the 10th January we reached a little clump of poplars on the
edge of a large plain on which no tree was visible. It was piercingly
cold, a bitter wind swept across the snow, making us glad to find even
this poor shelter against the co