ants of the East;
and, it may be, a good deal of the Americans in general. But I
suspect--at least I would fain hope--that you have only a vague and
indefinite knowledge of life in those wild, uncivilised regions of the
northern continent of America that surround the shores of Hudson Bay. I
would fain hope this, I say, that I may have the satisfaction of giving
you information on the subject, and of showing you that there is a body
of civilised men who move, and breathe (pretty cool air, by the way!),
and spend their lives in a quarter of the globe as totally different, in
most respects, from the part you inhabit, as a beaver, roaming among the
ponds and marshes of his native home, is from that sagacious animal when
converted into a fashionable hat.

About the middle of May eighteen hundred and forty-one, I was thrown
into a state of ecstatic joy by the arrival of a letter appointing me to
the enviable situation of apprentice clerk in the service of the
Honourable Hudson Bay Company. To describe the immense extent to which
I expanded, both mentally and bodily, upon the receipt of this letter,
is impossible; it is sufficient to know that from that moment I fancied
myself a complete man of business, and treated my old companions with
the condescending suavity of one who knows that he is talking to his
inferiors.

A few days after, however, my pride was brought very low indeed, as I
lay tossing about in my berth on the tumbling waves of the German Ocean,
eschewing breakfast as a dangerous meal, and looking upon dinner with a
species of horror utterly incomprehensible by those who have not
experienced an attack of sea-sickness. Miseries of this description,
fortunately, do not last long. In a couple of days we got into the
comparatively still water of the Thames; and I, with a host of
pale-faced young ladies and cadaverous-looking young gentlemen, emerged
for the first time from the interior of the ship, to behold the beauties
and wonders of the great metropolis, as we glided slowly up the crowded
river.

Leave-taking is a disagreeable subject either to reflect upon or to
write about, so we will skip that part of the business and proceed at
once to Gravesend, where I stood (having parted from all my friends) on
the deck of the good ship _Prince Rupert_, contemplating the boats and
crowds of shipping that passed continually before me, and thinking how
soon I was to leave the scenes to which I had been so long accusto