280 THKOUGH THE MACKENZIE BASIN 



any companionship worthy the name, and from all or almost all 

 that we are accustomed to regard as the advantages of civilization. 

 When sickness comes they are dependent upon themselves or on 

 their Indian neighbours. When their children grow up they must 

 send them away to school, often at an expense which their incomes 

 cannot well afford. Their promotion comes slowly at the best, for 

 it is a service in which men live long, and promotion may mean 

 the charge of a post or district farther away from civilization, 

 while the prospect of becoming a chief factor or of being able to 

 retire with a competency is distant and shadowy. Many mission- 

 aries will undergo all this and even more than this, but they are 

 supposed to be animated by a clear and lofty purpose that nerves 

 them for exile and hardship if they can but fulfil their aim. Gold 

 hunters will undergo much, but they, too, have a definite object; 

 but the spell of the Hudson's Bay Company's service seems as 

 vague and quite as powerful as that which binds the sailor to his 

 seafaring life, which he may often abuse, but which he cannot 

 abandon. Its agents may be attracted by the freedom from the 

 conventionalities and artificial restraints of society, by the authority 

 which they enjoy over Indians and half-breeds, as well as by the 

 scope for adventure and the opportunity for sport which most of 

 them delight in. Ask them what fascination they find in it and 

 they can hardly tell you. Listen to them when several of them 

 are together " talking musquash " (to use their own term for dis- 

 cussing the business of the Company) and they have not many 

 good words for the service; only when an outsider finds fault with 

 it will they speak up strongly in its defense, and yet let them 

 leave it for a time and many of them long to come back to it. 

 One of them, a young Irish gentleman who had spent years in 

 the service on the Upper Ottawa River and went home to Ireland, 

 informed some of his Canadian friends that he found Dublin 

 awfully dull after Temiscamingue! But, withal, among the officers 

 of the Hudson's Bay Company you find men of education and 

 refinement, competent to fill places of importance in society had 

 they chosen the more settled walks of life. 



