in a region where spirit of wine is the only thing that can be used in thermometers, because mercury would remain frozen nearly half the winter, mosquito nets are, for a portion of the year, as necessary as in the torrid zone. "Nothing could save one from the attacks of the mosquitoes. Almost all other insects went to rest with the sun: sandflies, which bit viciously during the day, went to sleep at night; the large _bulldog_, whose bite is terrible, slumbered in the evening; but the mosquito, the long-legged, determined, vicious, persevering mosquito, whose ceaseless hum dwells for ever in the ear, _never_ went to sleep! Day and night the painful tender little pimples on our necks, and behind our ears, were being constantly retouched by these villanous flies." Worse even than midges by a Scottish burn; and those, heaven knows, are bad enough. The young gentlemen at York Factory, however, thought it effeminate to combat the bloodsuckers with the natural defensive weapon of a gauze canopy, and, in spite of various ingenious expedients, such as rendering their rooms unbearable by bonfires of damp moss and puffs of gunpowder, they were preyed upon by the mosquitoes, until frost put a period to their sufferings, and to the existence of their persecutors. The account of York Factory, or Fort, (as all establishments in the Indian country, whether small or great, are called,) gives a general notion of the style and appearance of the more important of these trading posts. Within a large square, of about six or seven acres, enclosed by high stockades, nearly five miles above the mouth of Hayes River, stand a number of wooden buildings, stores, dwelling-houses, mess-rooms, and lodgings for labourers and tradesmen, as well as for visitors and temporary residents. The doors and windows are all double, and the houses heated by large iron stoves, fed with wood; "yet so intense is the cold that I have seen the stove in places _red-hot_, and a basin of water in the room _frozen_ solid." So unfavourable is the climate to vegetation, that scarcely any thing can be raised in the small plot of ground called by courtesy a garden. Potatoes now and then, for a wonder, become the size of walnuts; and sometimes a cabbage and a turnip are prevailed upon to grow. The woods are filled with a great variety of wild berries, among which the cranberry and swampberry are considered the best. Black and red currants, as well as gooseberries, are plentiful, but the first are bitter, and the latter small. The swampberry is in shape something like the raspberry, of a light yellow colour, and grows on a low bush, almost close to the ground. The country around the fort is one immense level swamp, thickly covered with willows, and dotted here and there with a few clumps of pine-trees. Flowers there are none, and the only large timber in the vicinity grows on the banks of Hayes and Nelson rivers, and is chiefly spruce-fir. On account of the swampy nature of