the street for Hamilton, I heard Colonel Adderly's last
fling--"Pretty rascals, you gentlemen adventurers are, so shy and coy
about law courts."

It was a dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle
moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded
snow from The Labrador, or sleet from the Gulf.

When Eric Hamilton left the Hudson's Bay Company's service at York
Factory on Hudson Bay and came to live in Quebec, I was but a student at
Laval. It was at my Uncle MacKenzie's that I met the tall, dark, sinewy,
taciturn man, whose influence was to play such a strange part in my
life; and when these two talked of their adventures in the far, lone
land of the north, I could no more conceal my awe-struck admiration than
a girl could on first discovering her own charms in a looking-glass. I
think he must have noticed my boyish reverence, for once he condescended
to ask about the velvet cap and green sash and long blue coat which made
up the Laval costume, and in a moment I was talking to him as volubly as
if he were the boy and I, the great Hudson's Bay trader.

"It makes me feel quite like a boy again," he had said on resuming
conversation with Mr. MacKenzie. "By Jove! Sir, I can hardly realize I
went into that country a lad of fifteen, like your nephew, and here I
am, out of it, an old man."

"Pah, Eric man," says my uncle, "you'll be finding a wife one of these
days and renewing your youth."

"Uncle," I broke out when the Hudson's Bay man had gone home, "how old
is Mr. Hamilton?"

"Fifteen years older than you are, boy, and I pray Heaven you may have
half as much of the man in you at thirty as he has," returns my uncle
mentally measuring me with that stern eye of his. At that information,
my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. Henceforth, I no longer looked
upon Mr. Hamilton with the same awe that a choir boy entertains for a
bishop. Something of comradeship sprang up between us, and before that
year had passed we were as boon companions as man and boy could be. But
Hamilton presently spoiled it all by fulfilling my uncle's prediction
and finding a wife, a beautiful, fair-haired, frail slip of a girl, near
enough the twenties to patronize me and too much of the young lady to
find pleasure in an awkward lad. That meant an end to our rides and
walks and sails down the St. Lawrence and long evening talks; but I took
my revenge by assuming the airs of a man of forty, at which Hamilton
qui