2 IN A FRONTIER SETTLEMENT 



and the trail, English-speaking, French, Galicians, 

 Halfbreeds, Indians, rough-clad, stalwart, un- 

 trammelled, who talk in slow-spoken speech 

 with fearless bearing, while about their feet 

 move their company of dogs — restless, prowling, 

 hungry brutes ; neglected summer pensioners, 

 but, in winter, the pride of their master^ — the 

 indomitable sled-dog. They are men and beast 

 of their surroundings ; hard-fighters who wrest 

 a stern living from virgin forest and stream, and 

 who ask no greater reward than to retain their 

 boundless freedom. 



To the men their freedom is their all. They 

 cannot tell you why, again and again they seek 

 the North ; yet they cannot leave it. A mood 

 of discontent, or a vivid picture of everlasting 

 pleasure which they paint in imagination, sends 

 most of them, at some time or other, to seek 

 " civilisation," saying, " I will live as other 

 people do." But they seldom, if ever, keep 

 their resolve. They are out on the North trail 

 just as soon as the primitive wildness, which 

 is in them as it is in wild animals, awakes anew 

 and bids them seek again the quiet places. Such 

 men are the vanguard — the unstarred leaders of 

 advancing immigration that, as the rising tide 

 on the seashore, ever overlaps the old mark, and 

 escapes onward, ever onward, to populate the 

 surface of a vast new country. 



Less prominent, far less striking, in this village 

 of the parting of the ways, are the people of the 

 New World — mill clerks, and trading store- 

 keepers, and their assistants ; and their two- 

 score wives and daughters. All somewhat dim- 



