318 Sport and Life. 



goods, and our salaries were paid in drafts on Montreal, or 

 credited to us in the London books. About that time the Com- 

 pany's local steamer, the old Beaver, paid us a visit, and from her 

 captain I traded a sovereign. This relic of far-off home I took 

 to the blacksmith of the fort, who finally succeeded in hammering 

 it out into a passable imitation of a hoop, and -with that ring I was 

 married." 



But now comes the strange part of the story. While the fort 

 blacksmith was occupied on this unusual job, a few Indians, as is 

 to this day the wont of the more unsophisticated natives, stood 

 about the door of the smithy silently watching the doings 

 of the hammer-wielding blacksmith. They saw what great 

 store was set upon that round disc of yellow metal, and 

 how carefully it was handled by horny hands. " Not long 

 afterwards," Finlayson informed me, " one of these Indians 

 brought me, wrapped in the toe of an old moccasin, a big 

 thimbleful of coarse ' dust,' which he said he had obtained from 

 Indians on the opposite mainland, who had got it on the banks 

 of the great river." This happened, if I remember the date 

 correctly, in the year 1850, and that thimbleful of "dust" was, 

 I believe, the first sample of the precious metal touched by 

 the hand of white men north of California. Its discovery 

 was bruited about, and led to more intelligent prospecting on 

 the Fraser, the results of which brought about the big rush of 

 1858 and 1859. 



But let me resume the thread of history. The men who did not 

 return to California's sun-baked valleys, or who refused to be lured 

 to any of the new discoveries, but who decided to " stay with " 

 the new born colony at whose cradle they had all stood, were 

 happily of the warp and woof best fitted for the hardy pioneer 

 colonist, such as have made the Greater Britain of to day. The old 

 flag in their eyes covered a multitude of sins, the salubrious, com- 

 paratively mild Devonshire-like climate of the coast districts, or the 

 keen bracing air of the breezy interior, with its cold winters and hot 

 summers, the wild and beautiful scenery, the facilities presented in 



