136 Our North Land. 



pound to two pounds ten shillings a month, and are always paid in 

 merchandise at Hudson's Bay Company's prices — prices that are 

 never complained of because there is not the slightest advantage in 

 complaining, but which are large enough to make up for the in- 

 frequency of purchases. They live and die in the service of the 

 Company, enjoy but few privileges, few comforts, and have no oppor- 

 tunities of learning anything about the world in which they live. 



From the large number of children among them, and their very 

 healthy condition, it is plain to be seen that they are on the increase. 

 They are provided with all the absolute necessities of life in full 

 supply. They are seldom in want of food, except occasionally when 

 the supplies at the post run short, as the country is full of deer, 

 wild geese in their season, and small game ; and, as the Company's 

 agents treat them honourably, their condition is one of comparative 

 comfort. In conversation and manners they are very simple, plain, 

 dull, and quiet people ; and, in speaking with them, one is impressed 

 with the dense ignorance of all things in which they live. Their 

 knowledge of mechanics is confined to fire-arms and sailing craft. 

 A steam engine is totally beyond their powers of comprehension. 

 One of them, in looking over the Neptune's machinery, thought it 

 could not have been made by man : that it must have grown. I was 

 interrogated* at some length by a Churchill breed above the average 

 in intelligence, concerning the proposed " locomoty," as he called it, 

 that Canada was going to " send " from Fort Garry to Churchill. 

 He had no idea whatever of a railway, and thought of the project 

 as a vast machine, the movements of which might be hard to control, 

 and dangerous in the extreme. 



" How high is a locomoty ?" he asked. I told him, and then he 

 observed, " I hears it is a terrible thing to yell : Does it yell most 

 in the day time or in nights ?" My explanations were not intel- 

 ligible to him. He meditated for a while, and then broke out : 

 " How does they fasten it ?" I compared it, to some extent, with 

 the engines of the Neptune, but soon learned that I had made a 

 fatal mistake. That man is irrecoverably confused with the idea 

 that a railway is a sort of ship, and I found it impossible to afford 

 him any light on the subject. 



