d discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
tomb.

On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
"Skin for skin."

It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of "outside" are
denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of "work
done squarely and unwasted days." What made the charm of this life to
these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
Caesar himself who declares, "Better be first in a little Iberian
village than second in Rome?"

We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
the end of his second journey.

"To-day William