214 BEGINS CATALOGUE OF CANADIAN PLANTS 



Owing to the work that was being done on the Canadian Pacific 

 Railway, I decided to go to Port Arthur and from there take the 

 train to Nipigon and explore Lake Nipigon. In June, 1884, my 

 son Willie and I started for Port Arthur and, when we arrived 

 there, I went up to the hotel and asked the proprietor the rates 

 per day. He stared me up and down, straightened himself and 

 said: "This is a first class hotel, and the rates are $3.00 per day." 

 The hotel was called the Pacific Hotel and I think another stands 

 on the same site today. As it was a $3.00 house, I did what we 

 always did in a city and put my boots outside in the hall for the 

 purpose of being cleaned during the night. When I got up in 

 the morning, I was surprised to find, though the boots were still 

 there, that they had never been touched. I immediately com- 

 plained to the proprietor about their not being cleaned and he 

 looked up at me with curiosity and said: "Did you find them at 

 your door?" I said that I had. "Well," he said, "You are very 

 lucky to have got them because they might have been taken in 

 the night and then you would have had none." 



In a short time, the train started for Nipigon and we reached 

 there, in due course, and camped near the big eddy pool where 

 the railway bridge was going to be built. It was a good place 

 for collecting and, as I at that time took up the study of almost 

 everything, I had a butterfly net and bottles for beetles, so that 

 we made a collection of insects and, in a lane running back from 

 our tent, we collected specimens of the butterfly which Dr. James 

 Fletcher and a Boston professor described as a new species, and 

 the life history of the insect is framed on the wall behind me as I 

 write. At this point, I engaged an Indian with a fine birch bark 

 canoe to take Willie and me up the Nipigon River to Lake Nipigon, 

 which I wished to explore. We had the usual incidents that take 

 place in ascending a river and, where we camped the first night, 

 the current was running quite swiftly and my son observed a 

 great number of fish in the river and told me that there were 

 many red-finned suckers in the stream and that he would like to 

 fish. I told him he could, but said that the fish were not suckers 

 but that they must be trout and he got a line and a little salt 

 pork and, in a couple of minutes, he had a fine large trout, over 



