ted by the Canadian Government, catch the
little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships _ad lib_.

[Illustration: Three of a Kind]

Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their proteges, that the
sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.

We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you
do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
candles like Alfred of old.

Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we f