questions as to beaver at Fort Hall or buffalo on the
Yellowstone or the Red. Thus I passed freely in and about all the public
places of the town, and inspected with a certain personal interest all
its points of interest, from the Gray Nunneries to the new cathedrals,
the Place d'Armes, the Champ de Mars, the barracks, the vaunted brewery,
the historic mountain, and the village lying between the arms of the two
rivers--a point where history for a great country had been made, and
where history for our own now was planning.

As I moved about from day to day, making such acquaintance as I could, I
found in the air a feeling of excitement and expectation. The hotels,
bad as they were, were packed. The public places were noisy, the private
houses crowded. Gradually the town became half-military and half-savage.
Persons of importance arrived by steamers up the river, on whose expanse
lay boats which might be bound for England--or for some of England's
colonies. The Government--not yet removed to Ottawa, later capital of
Ontario--was then housed in the old Chateau Ramezay, built so long
before for the French governor, Vaudreuil.

Here, I had reason to believe, was now established no less a personage
than Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Rumor had
it at the time that Lord Aberdeen of England himself was at Montreal.
That was not true, but I established without doubt that his brother
really was there, as well as Lieutenant William Peel of the Navy, son of
Sir Robert Peel, England's prime minister. The latter, with his
companion, Captain Parke, was one time pointed out to me proudly by my
inn-keeper--two young gentlemen, clad in the ultra fashion of their
country, with very wide and tall bell beavers, narrow trousers, and
strange long sack-coats unknown to us in the States--of little shape or
elegance, it seemed to me.

There was expectancy in the air, that was sure. It was open secret
enough in England, as well as in Montreal and in Washington, that a
small army of American settlers had set out the foregoing summer for the
valley of the Columbia, some said under leadership of the missionary
Whitman. Britain was this year awakening to the truth that these men had
gone thither for a purpose. Here now was a congress of Great Britain's
statesmen, leaders of Great Britain's greatest monopoly, the Hudson Bay
Company, to weigh this act of the audacious American Republic. I was not
a week in Montreal before I l