or Semple's private room. I was loath to be a party to this mad
nonsense, but the fly and the fish should have thought of results before
venturing too near strange coils. The red-faced fellow gave me a push.
The sober man muttered, "Better come, or they'll raise a row," and we
were all within the forbidden place, the door shut and bolted.

To city folk, used to the luxuries of the east, I dare say that office
would have seemed mean enough. But the men had been so long away from
leather chairs, hair-cloth sofa, wall mirror, wine decanter and other
odds and ends which furnish a gentleman's living apartments that the
very memory of such things had faded, and that small room, with its
old-country air, seemed the vestibule to another world.

"Sump--too--uss--ain't it?" asked the sober man with bated breath and
obvious distrust of his tongue.

"Mag--nee--feque! M. Louis Laplante, look you there," cried the
Frenchman, catching sight of his full figure in the mirror and instantly
striking a pose of admiration. Then he twirled fiercely at both ends of
his mustache till it stood out with the wire finish of a Parisian dandy.

The red-faced fellow had permitted me, with arms still tied, to walk
across the room and sit on the hair-cloth sofa. He was lolling back in
the governor's armchair, playing the lord and puffing one of Mr.
Semple's fine pipes.

"We are gentlemen adventurers of the ancient and honorable Hudson's Bay
Company, gentlemen adventurers," he roared, bringing his fist down with
a thud on the desk. "We hereby decree that the Fort William brigade be
captured, that the whisky be freely given to every dry-throated lad in
the Hudson's Bay Company, that the Nor'-Westers be sent down the Red on
a raft, that this meeting raftify this dissolution, afterwards
moving--seconding--and unanimously amending----"

"Adjourning--you mean," interrupted one of the orator's audience.

"I say," called one, who had been dazed by the splendor, "how do you
tell which is the lookin' glass and which is the window?" And he looked
from the window on one side to its exact reflection, length and width,
directly opposite.

The puzzle was left unsolved; for just then Louis Laplante found a flask
of liquor and speedily divided its contents among the crowd--which was
not calculated to clear up mysteries of windows and mirrors among those
addle-pates. Dull wit may be sport for drunken men, but it is mighty
flat to an onlooker, and I was out of pa