homeward
journey to London.

For one season at least the settlers will face the rigor of this
Northern Clime.

CHAPTER IV.

A WINTER OF DISCONTENT.

The Emigrant ship has landed its living freight at Fort Factory, upon
the Coast of Hudson Bay--a shore unoccupied for hundreds of miles except
by a few Hudson's Bay Company forts such as those at the mouth of the
Nelson River, and of Fort Churchill, a hundred miles or more farther
north. It was now the end of the season, and it will not do to trifle
with the nip of cold "Boreas" on the shore of Hudson Bay. The icy winter
is at hand, and all know that they will face such temperatures as they
never had seen even among the stormy Hebrides, or in the Northward
Orkneys. Lord Selkirk's dreams are now to be tested. Is the story of the
Colony to be an epic or a drama?

It was by no means the first experiment of facing in an unprepared way
the rigors of a North American winter.

In the fourth year of the Seventeenth Century De Monts, a French
Colonizer, had a band of his countrymen on Douchet's Island, in the Ste.
Croix River, on the borders of New Brunswick. Though fairly well
provided in some ways yet the winter proved so trying that out of the
number of less than eighty, nearly one-half died. The winter was so
long, weary and deadly, that in the spring the survivors of the Colony
were moved to Port Royal in Acadia and the Ste. Croix was given up. This
was surely dramatic; this was tragic indeed. But in the fourth year of
this Century, the Tercentenary of this event was celebrated in Annapolis
and St. John, as the writer himself beheld, and the shouts and applause
of gathered thousands made a great and patriotic epic.

Again four years after De Monts, when knowledge of climate and
conditions had become known to the French pioneers, Samuel de Champlain
wintered with his crew and a few settlers on the site of Old Quebec, on
the St. Lawrence. Discontent and dissension led to rebellion, and blood
was shed in the execution of the plotters. Hunger, suffering and the
dreadful scurvy attacked the founder's party of less than thirty, of
whom only ten survived, and yet in July of 1908, the writer witnessed
the grand Tercentenary celebration of Champlain's settlement of Quebec,
and with the presence of the Prince of Wales, General Roberts, the idol
of the British Army, a joint fleet, of eleven English, French and
American first-class Men-of War, with pageantry and music, th