M'Keetoor's Voyage to Hudson 1 s Bay. 53 



of diet on which they principally subsist during their journies 

 into the interior. 



The character I have here given applies principally to the 

 northern Indian women, as the southern Indian females are, 

 I have been informed, a most profligate abandoned set. Like 

 every other class of people, however, there are exceptions. 

 Amongst them, Mr. Hearne, in his interesting work, gives 

 the following very remarkable one : 



Mary, the daughter of Moses Norton, a native of the 

 country, and for many years chief at Prince of Wales's Port, 

 in Hudson's Bay, though born and brought up in a country of 

 all others the least favourable to virtue and to virtuous princi- 

 ples, possessed these and every other good and amiable qua- 

 lity in the most eminent degree. Without the assistance of 

 religion, and with no education but what she received among 

 the dissolute natives of her country, she would have shone 

 with superior lustre in any community ; for if an engaging 

 person, gentle manners, an easy freedom, arising from a con- 

 sciousness of innocence; an amiable modesty, and an unrivalled 

 delicacy of sentiment, are graces and virtues which render a 

 woman lovely, none ever had greater pretensions to esteem 

 and regard ; while her benevolence, humanity, and scrupu- 

 lous adherence to truth, would have done honour to the most 

 enlightened and devout Christian. Dutiful, obedient, and af- 

 fectionate to her parents, steady and faithful to her friends, 

 grateful and humble to her benefactors ; easily forgiving and 

 forgetting injuries, careful not to offend any, and courteous 

 and kind to all ; she was nevertheless suffered to perish by the 

 rigours of cold and hunger, amidst her own relations, at 

 a time when the griping hand of famine was by no means 

 severely felt by any other member of their company; and it 

 may truly be said, that she fell a martyr to the principles of 

 virtue. This happened in the winter of the year 1782, after 

 the French had destroyed Prince of Wales's Fort, at which 

 time she was in the 22d year of her age. Human nature 

 shudders at the bare recital of such brutality, and reason 

 shrinks from the task of accounting for the decrees of Provi- 

 dence on such occasions as this ; out they are the strongest 

 assurances of a future state, -so infinitely superior to the pre- 

 sent, that the enjoyment of every pleasure in this world, by 

 the most worthless and abandoned wretch, or the most inno- 

 cent and virtuous woman, perishing by the most excruciating 

 of all deaths, are matters equally indifferent ; but 



Peace to the ashes and the virtuous mind 

 Of her who liv'd in peace with all mankind ; 



