The winter packet—Harry hears from old friends, and wishes that he was with them.

Letters from home! What a burst of sudden emotion—what a riot of conflicting feelings, of dread and joy,—expectation and anxiety—what a flood of old memories—what stirring up of almost forgotten associations these three words create in the hearts of those who dwell in distant regions of this earth, far, far away from kith and kin, from friends and acquaintances, from the much-loved scenes of childhood, and from home! Letters from home! How gratefully the sound falls upon ears that have been long unaccustomed to sounds and things connected with home, and so long accustomed to wild, savage sounds, that these have at length lost their novelty, and become everyday and commonplace, while the first have gradually grown strange and unwonted. For many long months home and all connected with it have become a dream of other days, and savage-land a present reality. The mind has by degrees become absorbed by surrounding objects—objects so utterly unassociated with or unsuggestive of any other land, that it involuntarily ceases to think of the scenes of childhood with the same feelings that it once did. As time rolls on, home assumes a misty, undefined character, as if it were not only distant in reality, but were also slowly retreating farther and farther away—growing gradually faint and dream-like, though not less dear, to the mental view.

“Letters from home!” shouted Mr Wilson, and the doctor, and the skipper, simultaneously, as the sportsmen, after dashing through the wild storm, at last reached the fort, and stumbled tumultuously into Bachelors’ Hall.

“What!—Where!—How!—You don’t mean it!” they exclaimed, coming to a sudden stand, like three pillars of snow-clad astonishment.

“Ay,” replied the doctor, who affected to be quite cool upon all occasions, and rather cooler than usual if the occasion was more than ordinarily exciting—“ay, we do mean it. Old Rogan has got the packet, and is even now disembowelling it.”

“More than that,” interrupted the skipper, who sat smoking as usual by the stove, with his hands in his breeches pockets—“more than that, I saw him dissecting into the very marrow of the thing; so if we don’t storm the old admiral in his cabin, he’ll go to sleep over these prosy yarns that the governor-in-chief writes to him, and we’ll have to whistle for our letters till midnight.”

The skipper’s remark was interrupted by the opening of the outer door and the entrance of the butler. “Mr Rogan wishes to see you, sir,” said that worthy to the accountant.

“I’ll be with him in a minute,” he replied, as he threw off his capote and proceeded to unwind himself as quickly as his multitudinous haps would permit.

By this time Harry Somerville and Hamilton were busily occupied in a similar manner, while a running fire of question and answer, jesting remark and bantering reply, was kept up between the young men, from their various apartments and the hall. The doctor was cool, as usual, and impudent. He had a habit of walking up and down while he smoked, and was thus enabled to look in upon the inmates of the several sleeping-rooms, and make his remarks in a quiet, sarcastic manner, the galling effect of which was heightened by his habit of pausing at the end of every two or three words, to emit a few puffs of smoke. Having exhausted a good deal of small talk in this way, and having, moreover, finished his pipe, the doctor went to the stove to refill and relight.

“What a deal of trouble you do take to make yourself comfortable!” said he to the skipper, who sat with his chair tilted on its hind legs, and a pillow at his back.

“No harm in that, doctor,” replied the skipper, with a smile.

“No harm, certainly, but it looks uncommonly lazy-like.”

“What does?”

“Why, putting a pillow at your back, to be sure.”

The doctor was a full-fleshed, muscular man, and owing to this fact it mattered little to him whether his chair happened to be an easy one or not. As the skipper sometimes remarked, he carried padding always about with him; he was, therefore, a little apt to sneer at the attempts of his brethren to render the ill-shaped, wooden-bottomed chairs, with which the hall was ornamented, bearable.

“Well, doctor,” said the skipper, “I cannot see how you make me out lazy. Surely it is not an evidence of laziness my endeavouring to render these instruments of torture less tormenting? Seeking to be comfortable, if it does not inconvenience any one else, is not laziness. Why, what is comfort?” The skipper began to wax philosophical at this point, and took the pipe from his mouth as he gravely propounded the momentous question. “What is comfort? If I go out to camp in the woods, and after turning in find a sharp stump sticking into my ribs on one side, and a pine root driving in the small of my back on the other side, is that comfort? Certainly not. And if I get up, seize a hatchet, level the stump, cut away the root, and spread pine brush over the place, am I to be called lazy for doing so? Or if I sit down on a chair, and on trying to lean back to rest myself find that the stupid lubber who made it has so constructed it that four small hard points alone touch my person—two being at the hip-joints and two at the shoulder-blades; and if to relieve such physical agony I jump up and clap a pillow at my back, am I to be called lazy for doing that?”

“What a glorious entry that would make in the log!” said the doctor, in a low tone, soliloquisingly, as if he made the remark merely for his own satisfaction, while he tapped the ashes out of his pipe.

The skipper looked as if he meditated a sharp reply; but his intentions, whatever they might have been, were interrupted by the opening of the door, and the entrance of the accountant, bearing under his arm a packet of letters.

A general rush was made upon him, and in a few minutes a dead silence reigned in the hall, broken only at intervals by an exclamation of surprise or pathos, as the inmates, in the retirement of their separate apartments, perused letters from friends in the interior of the country and friends at home: letters that were old—some of them bearing dates many months back—and travel-stained, but new and fresh and cheering, nevertheless, to their owners, as the clear, bright sun in winter or the verdant leaves in spring.

Harry Somerville’s letters were numerous and long. He had several from friends in Red River, besides one or two from other parts of the Indian country, and one—it was very thick and heavy—that bore the post-marks of Britain. It was late that night ere the last candle was extinguished in the hall, and it was late, too, before Harry Somerville ceased to peruse and re-peruse the long letter from home, and found time or inclination to devote to his other correspondents.

Among the rest was a letter from his old friend and companion, Charley Kennedy, which ran as follows:—

    My Dear Harry,—It really seems more than an age since I saw you. Your last epistle, written in the perturbation of mind consequent upon being doomed to spend another winter at York Fort, reached me only a few days ago, and filled me with pleasant recollections of other days. Oh! man, how much I wish that you were with me in this beautiful country! You are aware that I have been what they call “roughing it” since you and I parted on the shores of Lake Winnipeg; but, my dear fellow, the idea that most people have of what that phrase means is a very erroneous one indeed. “Roughing it” I certainly have been, inasmuch as I have been living on rough fare, associating with rough men, and sleeping on rough beds under the starry sky; but I assure you that all this is not half so rough upon the constitution as what they call leading an easy life, which is simply a life that makes a poor fellow stagnate, body and spirit, till the one comes to be unable to digest its food, and the other incompetent to jump at so much as half an idea. Anything but an easy life, to my mind. Ah! there’s nothing like roughing it, Harry, my boy. Why, I am thriving on it—growing like a young walrus, eating like a Canadian voyageur, and sleeping like a top! This is a splendid country for sport, and as our bourgeois (the gentleman in charge of an establishment is always designated the bourgeois) has taken it into his head that I am a good hand at making friends with the Indians, he has sent me out on several expeditions, and afforded me some famous opportunities of seeing life among the redskins. There is a talk just now of establishing a new outpost in this district, so if I succeed in persuading the governor to let me accompany the party, I shall have something interesting to write about in my next letter. By the way, I wrote to you a month ago, by two Indians who said they were going to the missionary station at Norway House. Did you ever get it? There is a hunter here just now who goes by the name of Jacques Caradoc. He is a first-rater—can do anything, in a wild way, that lies within the power of mortal man, and is an inexhaustible anecdote-teller, in a quiet way. He and I have been out buffalo-hunting two or three times, and it would have done your heart good, Harry, my dear boy, to have seen us scouring over the prairie together on two big-boned Indian horses—regular trained buffalo-runners, that didn’t need the spur to urge, nor the rein to guide them, when once they caught sight of the black cattle, and kept a sharp look-out for badger-holes, just as if they had been reasonable creatures. The first time I went out I had several rather ugly falls, owing to my inexperience. The fact is, that if a man has never run buffaloes before, he’s sure to get one or two upsets, no matter how good a horseman he may be. And that monster Jacques, although he’s the best fellow I ever met with for a hunting companion, always took occasion to grin at my mishaps, and gravely to read me a lecture to the effect that they were all owing to my own clumsiness or stupidity; which, you will acknowledge, was not calculated to restore my equanimity.

    The very first run we had cost me the entire skin of my nose, and converted that feature into a superb Roman for the next three weeks. It happened thus. Jacques and I were riding over the prairie in search of buffaloes. The place was interspersed with sundry knolls covered with trees, slips and belts of woodland, with ponds scattered among them, and open sweeps of the plain here and there; altogether a delightful country to ride through. It was a clear early morning, so that our horses were fresh and full of spirit. They knew, as well as we ourselves did, what we were out for, and it was no easy matter to restrain them. The one I rode was a great long-legged beast, as like as possible to that abominable kangaroo that nearly killed me at Red River; as for Jacques, he was mounted on a first-rate charger. I don’t know how it is, but somehow or other everything about Jacques, or belonging to him, or in the remotest degree connected with him, is always first-rate! He generally owns a first-rate horse, and if he happens by any unlucky chance to be compelled to mount a bad one, it immediately becomes another animal. He seems to infuse some of his own wonderful spirit into it! Well, as Jacques and I curvetted along, skirting the low bushes at the edge of a wood, out burst a whole herd of buffaloes. Bang went Jacques’s gun, almost before I had winked to make sure that I saw rightly, and down fell the fattest of them all, while the rest tossed up their tails, heels, and heads in one grand whirl of indignant amazement, and scoured away like the wind. In a moment our horses were at full stretch after them, on their own account entirely, and without any reference to us. When I recovered my self-possession a little, I threw forward my gun and fired; but owing to my endeavouring to hold the reins at the same time, I nearly blew off one of my horse’s ears, and only knocked up the dust about six yards ahead of us! Of course Jacques could not let this pass unnoticed. He was sitting quietly loading his gun, as cool as a cucumber, while his horse was dashing forward at full stretch, with the reins hanging loosely on his neck.

    “Ah, Mister Charles,” said he, with the least possible grin on his leathern visage, “that was not well done. You should never hold the reins when you fire, nor try to put the gun to your shoulder. It an’t needful. The beast’ll look arter itself, if it’s a riglar buffalo-runner; any ways, holdin’ the reins is of no manner of use. I once know’d a gentleman that came out here to see the buffalo-huntin’. He was a good enough shot in his way, an’ a first-rate rider. But he was full o’ queer notions: he would load his gun with the ramrod in the riglar way, instead o’ doin’ as we do, tumblin’ in a drop powder, spittin’ a ball out your mouth down the muzzle, and hittin’ the stock on the pommel of the saddle to send it home. And he had them miserable things—the somethin’ ’cussion-caps, and used to fiddle away with them while we were knockin’ over the cattle in all directions. Moreover, he had a notion that it was altogether wrong to let go his reins even for a moment, and so, what between the ramrod and the ’cussion-caps and the reins, he was worse than the greenest clerk that ever came to the country. He gave it up in despair at last, after lamin’ two horses, and finished off by runnin’ after a big bull, that turned on him all of a suddent, crammed its head and horns into the side of his horse, and sent the poor fellow head over heels on the green grass. He wasn’t much the worse for it, but his fine double-barrelled gun was twisted into a shape that would almost have puzzled an Injin to tell what it was.” Well, Harry, all the time that Jacques was telling me this we were gaining on the buffaloes, and at last we got quite close to them, and as luck would have it, the very thing that happened to the amateur sportsman happened to me. I went madly after a big bull in spite of Jacques’s remonstrances, and just as I got alongside of him up went his tail (a sure sign that his anger was roused), and round he came, head to the front, stiff as a rock; my poor charger’s chest went right between his horns, and, as a matter of course, I continued the race upon nothing, head first, for a distance of about thirty yards, and brought up on the bridge of my nose. My poor dear father used to say I was a bull-headed rascal, and, upon my word, I believe he was more literally correct than he imagined; for although I fell with a fearful crash, head first, on the hard plain, I rose up immediately, and in a few minutes was able to resume the chase again. My horse was equally fortunate, for although thus brought to a sudden stand while at full gallop, he wheeled about, gave a contemptuous flourish with his heels, and cantered after Jacques, who soon caught him again. My head bothered me a good deal for some time after this accident, and swelled up till my eyes became almost undistinguishable; but a few weeks put me all right again. And who do you think this man Jacques is? You’d never guess. He’s the trapper whom Redfeather told us of long ago, and whose wife was killed by the Indians. He and Redfeather have met, and are very fond of each other. How often in the midst of these wild excursions have my thoughts wandered to you, Harry! The fellows I meet with here are all kind-hearted, merry companions, but none like yourself. I sometimes say to Jacques, when we become communicative to each other beside the camp-fire, that my earthly felicity would be perfect if I had Harry Somerville here; and then I think of Kate, my sweet, loving sister Kate, and feel that, even although I had you with me, there would still be something wanting to make things perfect. Talking of Kate, by the way, I have received a letter from her, the first sheet of which, as it speaks of mutual Red River friends, I herewith enclose. Pray keep it safe, and return per first opportunity. We’ve loads of furs here and plenty of deer-stalking, not to mention galloping on horseback on the plains in summer and dog-sledging in winter. Alas! my poor friend, I fear that it is rather selfish in me to write so feelingly about my agreeable circumstances, when I know you are slowly dragging out your existence at that melancholy place York Fort; but believe me, I sympathise with you, and I hope earnestly that you will soon be appointed to more genial scenes. I have much, very much, to tell you yet, but am compelled to reserve it for a future epistle, as the packet which is to convey this is on the point of being closed.

    Adieu, my dear Harry, and wherever you may happen to pitch your tent, always bear in kindly remembrance your old friend, Charles Kennedy.

The letter was finished, but Harry did not cease to hold intercourse with his friend. With his head resting on his two hands and his elbows on the table, he sat long, sile............