BUSINESS AND ROMANCE 323 



road they continued their journey to Montreal; where together 

 with the "returns" from many another of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company's thirty-four districts, they were reshipped in ocean- 

 going craft for England where eventually they were sold by 

 auction in London. 



A hundred years ago as many as ten brigades, each number- 

 ing twenty six-fathom canoes, sometimes swept along those 

 northern highways and awoke those wild solitudes with the 

 rollicking songs and laughter of fifteen or sixteen hundred 

 voyageurs; but alas for those wonderfully picturesque days of 

 bygone times! The steamboats and the railroads have driven 

 them away. 



In my youth, however, I was fortunate enough to have 

 travelled with the last of those once-famous fur brigades; and 

 also to have learned from personal experience the daily life 

 of the northern woods the drama of the forests of which in 

 my still earlier youth I had had so many day-dreams; and now 

 if in describing and depicting it to you I have succeeded in im- 

 parting at least a fraction of the pleasure it gave me to witness 

 it, I am well repaid. But perhaps you are wondering about the 

 beautiful Athabasca? 



ATHABASCA AND SON-IN-LAW 



Some years later, while on my second visit to Fort Con- 

 solation, I not only found a flourishing town of some four or 

 five thousand inhabitants built on Free Trader Spear's original 

 freehold, but in the handsome brick City Hall standing in 

 the original stump-lot I met the old Free Trader himself, now 

 holding office as the Mayor of Spearhead City. Not only had 

 he become wealthy rumour said he was already a millionaire 

 but he had taken another man into partnership, for now over 

 his big brick storehouse read a huge sign in golden letters 

 "SPEAR AND . . . For like all day-dreams if only 



