34 A SPORTSMAN'S EDEN. 



where everyone seemed, if I may coin a phrase, 

 to be working a quicker stroke than in the old 

 country. How they earn their bread I cannot 

 tell ; but I suppose this region between Ottawa 

 and Lake Nipissing owes more to the saw-mill 

 than to the plough ; at any rate, no one seemed to 

 have time to go about informing the world that 

 ' they'd got no work to do, and Eng-i-land, poor 

 old Eng-i-land, is agoing down the 'ill,' as I heard 

 the men doing at 'home before I left. All the 

 first day we were whirled at about the rate of 

 twenty miles an hour through trapper-land, where 

 until lately the only sign of civilization was at 

 some Hudson Bay Company's post, whose agents 

 gathered together year by year the fur harvest 

 of the red men hunters who, after a long summer 

 of idleness, used to turn out into the woods in 

 winter, with the thermometer sometimes forty 

 degrees below zero, and earn by their hard work, 

 abstinence, and exposure some 1,300 dollars 

 apiece to spend in many-coloured blankets for 

 their squaws, and whisky, when they could get it, 

 for themselves. We saw a few of the redskins 

 at the stations painted beauties of the Ojibbe- 

 way persuasion, engaged in earnest endeavours to 

 pass off cows'-horns neatly polished as horns of 

 the buffalo of the plains. It is quaint to see two 

 or three of these women wrapped in red and 



