ears at school. _Eh bien_, Charl', you will be good boy now?
If not I shall tell your papa!

"You see," he explained to the others who now for the first time were
getting some acquaintance of this mission-work, "we try to do the best
we know, and to make life easier for these people in the Far North. It
is a hard fortune that they have. Always they starve--never have they
enough. And every year the great brigade goes north so that they may
last yet another year."

Presently there came down overland to the fleet yet other men who made
part of the strange, wild company. Cap. Shott, friendly and paternal
in his way, brought on for introduction to the party the Dominion
judge, who every year goes north to settle the legal disputes which
may have arisen at the several posts for a considerable distance to
the north. The judge had with him his clerk and secretary, and there
was also a commissioner, as well as another official, a member of the
Indian Department, who was bound north to pay the tribesmen their
treaty money.

There came also the wife of a member of the Anglican Church, which, as
well as the Catholic Church, has missions all along the great waterway
almost to the Arctic Sea. So that, as may be seen, the personnel of
the brigade that year was of varied and interesting composition.

All came out as Uncle Dick and Father Le Fevre had said--by the time
breakfast was over the half-breed boatmen began to come down at a trot
overland from the town. Few of them had slept. All of them had been
drinking most of the night. They came with their heads tied up, their
eyes red, each man looking uncomfortable, but they all went aboard and
made ready for their work. Father Le Fevre shook his head as he looked
at them.

"Too bad, too bad, my children!" said he, "but you will not learn, you
will not learn at all. However, two days on the river and your heads
will be more clear. Providence has arranged, I presume, that there
shall be two or three days' travel between the landing and the Grand
Rapids. Else fewer of our boats would get through!"

As the scows swung out into the river, under no motive power excepting
that of the current, the men arranged themselves for the long journey,
each to suit himself, but under a loose sort of system of government.
At the long steering-sweep, made from a spruce pole twenty feet in
length, stood always the steersman, holding the scow straight in the
current. The ten tons of luggage was piled