""Ugly enough, and the animal has an ugly trick, when in danger, of giving out a horrid smell. I was once in a train which went over a skunk, and the smell in the car was stifling-I never felt anything like it. But its fur is beautiful."

4.

asked.

"Shall we see any of these creatures?" I

"It is not likely. They are scarcer now than they used to be, and they'll grow scarcer still, as the land gets settled. There's room here for at least three times as many people as there are in the British Islands; they can have land for almost nothing, and you see what crops they raise."

5. "That seems a fine river we are crossing,"

said I.

"Yes!" he answered, "there are rivers and lakes without number: but it would be of no use to give you all their names. This is the great river of these parts, or, at least, one branch of it-the south branch of the Saskatchewan. We shall see the north branch by-and-by.

་

6. "Both these streams, and a vast number of others, are carrying the waters of the Rocky Mountains, by different courses, to the Arctic Ocean: some direct, some by Hudson's Bay, some (like the Saskatchewan) by the northern end of Lake Winnipeg. To the north of us are the Athabasca

and other streams, running into the Great Slave Lake, and so feeding the chief river of the NorthWest, the Mackenzie."

7. "I wish," I said, "we could have seen the Arctic Ocean."

"We shall get a peep at a corner of it from your uncle's ship, if we are not stopped by the ice. To see more, we ought to have had a summer before

us.

8. "All along the broken northern coast, are numberless creeks, and bays, and straits, and islands; and every one of them bears witness to the courage and patience of the explorers who fought their way to them. Ah, Charlie! many a brave heart has found a grave in that unkindly region, down to the last and noblest of them all, Sir John Franklin!"

9. "They wanted to find a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, did they not?" said I.

""Yes! And it was really found by Franklin, though it can never be of any use. If we were to go down to the mouth of the Mackenzie, and sail 300 miles or so to the northward, we should find a clear passage in summer, through Banks' Strait, Melville Sound, and Barrow Strait, into Baffin's Bay, and so into the open Atlantic.

IO. "To the west, in most seasons, there is a

hopeless barrier of ice, and no trading vessels would think of coming that way.

“But here we are at Battleford, on the northern Saskatchewan, the capital of the North-Western Territories. We'll stay here a night or two, and I'll tell you all I can about the Rocky Mountains, and what lies beyond."'

VIII. BRITISH COLUMBIA.

Port Nelson, September 20.

1. ‘My last letter, Johnny! I thought I would write it and send it, though I am not sure that it will reach you much sooner than I shall.

2. ‘I shan't try to tell you now the stories Mr. Campbell told me at Battleford, about buffalohunting in the plains, and fights with grizzly bears in the mountains. They will keep till we are all sitting round the fire at home on a winter evening.

3. ‘But all that's nearly at an end! As settlers multiply, the buffalo will disappear, and, when the buffalo is gone, the Indian hunting tribes must give up their roving life.

4. "Now, my lad," he went on, "fancy yourself in the Rockies, the back-bone of North America, stretching along its whole length from north to