r time to the Company, the
church, and the household it is not wicked to take one-tenth for
herself. Indeed, there are times when she honestly desires to be
wicked and to take several-tenths for herself. The whole arrangement
she stigmatizes as a graceless one and a blot on the Company's
escutcheon.

Still, there are drawbacks in being so far from a dentist. It was only
yesterday that a woman who was using the river as her wash-pot, dropped
her new set of teeth overboard. She had not been out for five years
and made the trip with her husband and her two youngest sons at the
cost of much time and money. However amusing the incident might be to
thoughtless onlookers, at the bottom it was almost tragic, and she, at
least, is hoping that the H. B. Co. dentist will meet no dire or
untimely fate before reaching Grouard. This is a healthful-bodied,
healthful-minded woman with a temperament that adjusts itself to life.
She is proud of the fact that she is educating her five sons at home;
that she cooks for the ten men engaged in her husband's saw-mill, and
that she has twelve hundred cabbages in her garden. I am glad she
wears a hoop of diamonds on her finger and that her fur wrap would cost
a fortune in Paris. It means that her husband is no stingy,
unappreciative curmudgeon and that all is well with her.

Sawridge is at the mouth of the Lesser Slave River where it enters into
the lake of the same name. At present, it consists of a Hudson's Bay
Company post and a telegraph office. Some day, by reason of its
location, it will be a good-sized town. Farther on are the Swan Hills
and the Swan River. This is the river referred to by Lever in _Charles
O'Malley_. The young gentleman whose affairs were in an ill posture
had his choice, you may remember, between going to "Hell or Swan
River." This was a libel on the place and an impudent falsity, for, if
you omit the mosquitoes with their unhandsome manners, one might call
it the trail to Paradise. Besides, if life cut too hard the young
gentleman might have taken his last trail here. It would not have been
a bad death either--a wide sky, a wide sea, and a sudden dip into
immortality--or oblivion.

On the lower deck, the Indians who travel to Grouard for the Golden
Jubilee of the great Bishop Grouard are whiling away the time by
playing poker. The cards which they use weigh twice as much as when
purchased, but why worry in a land where microbes are unheard of and so