DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 15 



Edmonton he was a servant of the Company, viceroy, in- 

 deed, of a vast empire, but handling only supplies which 

 belonged to the Company and not to him. Nearly every 

 Hudson's Bay man of that time and many of them even 

 to-day have that feeling of trusteeship which makes it 

 unthinkable to let anything go to waste that belongs to 

 the Company. But few if any carried it to such extremes 

 as Anderson. 



To most of us it was laughable. He would, for in- 

 stance, try to impress on every one that no matter what 

 they paid for their transportation and daily food they 

 were not paying nearly as much as the bother of carrying 

 them was worth. For that reason he insisted we were all 

 guests of the Company and not ordinary passengers and 

 we owed to the Company the courtesy of a guest towards 

 a host. One thing he felt we should not do was to com- 

 mence eating before he started or to continue after he 

 stopped. He ate frugally and rapidly but in his opinion 

 the quantity he ate was enough and the time was sufficient 

 for any one to eat all that was good for him. He ex- 

 pected us to stop eating when he did and I for one always 

 did so, but there were six or eight other passengers 

 (missionaries, Government officials, etc.) who felt they 

 were paying enough for their food and that they were 

 entitled to gorge themselves if they chose. Anderson 

 spoke of them with bitterness as lacking in courtesy, as 

 gluttonous and as unable to appreciate how precious 

 food is and how many people there are in the world who 

 have not enough of it. That was a point of view little 

 comprehensible then but one which we understand better 

 now since the Great War put us on rations and since we 

 have come into more intimate contact with famines in 

 Russia, China and elsewhere. 



