s of any kind"
meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
shrew-mouse, mole, or "other small quadruped," while his chum pours in
the _aqua vitae_ or precious conversation water, we declare that science
asks too much.

An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
that there is no veneration for old things.

It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
bacon for an Indian customer. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!

What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
who says, "I love to browse in a library"? Judging by the dust and
cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
years. Present-day Simpson has seldom "fed on the dainties that are bred
in a book." Here is a first edition of _The Spectator_, and next it a
_Life of Garrick_, with copies of _Virgil_, and all _Voltaire_ and