beaver was a carpenter
who, through some distemper of the mind, kept working while the moose
were on the runway so that he frightened them away. This caused the
chief hunter to become very angry and he said to the beaver, "Thou
shalt built always, and men shall break down thy work and take thy pelt
for covering. Also, thou shalt eat wood forever."

I cannot hear any more of these stories for my attention is drawn to a
man who has come close to the ship in a small row-boat. The engine has
stopped and a permit is handed to him over the side of the vessel. The
man looks like a Scotchman, seems like an Irishman, but in reality is a
German, an erstwhile soldier, who makes his livelihood in curing and
smoking fish. He is indulging in a surly and wrong-headed paroxysm
because Elise, his wife, is not on the boat. Elise went to the city to
have her teeth filled and still lingers in the south. A certain rude
fellow with a brass-throated laugh is suggesting of the
soldier-fisherman that Elise may be appreciative of the change of
society and that he is foolish to look for her under two months.
"Better enjoy your permit before Elise gets home; that's my advice,"
enjoins the tormentor.

"About the viskey, not one tam I care," replies the irascible husband,
"it's ma vife I vant. Ma vife she in Edmonton stays"--a praiseworthy
choice on his part which, to our way of thinking, minifies the
oft-urged but yet unproven claim that "A woman's only a woman, but a
good cigar's a smoke."

As the man pushes off, Baldy, a pucker-faced fellow whose real name is
Nathaniel, assures me that this German is considered "sorta queer"
hereabouts, and that it is nothing short of flat irreverence for a man
to speak so lightly about his permit in a land of such inordinate
thirsts.

This matter of leaving home for the treatment of sore molars has
suddenly become an important one in the north. Hitherto, the traders
of the Hudson's Bay Company and the missionaries did not need to go to
the city on business, or to see their mother-in-law; their errand was
teeth. But this summer, the Company seems to have waxed over-wise, for
the Inspector of Posts is bringing a dentist. It was only yesterday
that a woman who [Transcriber's note: line possibly missing here] women
alike consider this to be an ill courtesy and hold to the hope that the
dentist may be drowned at Athabasca Landing. The woman who tells me of
it believes when one gives nine-tenths of he