also as to the other objects proposed in the scheme officially laid before the public. "Before leaving England, I repeatedly pressed the necessity of communicating with the Governor and 'wintering partners' of the Company in America, so that they should not hear of the transfer of the property for the first time from the newspapers; and I expected to be specially authorized to give the needful information and assurances. I was no party, I beg to say, to this mention of my name in the prospectus; but my friends and business connections who may have taken shares on the faith of my name, will naturally hold me responsible accordingly. Still, anxious to witness the success of a project which, energetically managed, is so intrinsically sound, I refrained from writing to you to decline the responsibility, hoping that the original plan of delegation, though delayed, would be carried out. That plan, I must observe, involved not a mere commission of engineers to explore the route for a telegraph to Jasper House, as assumed in the Secretary's letter of the 13th inst., but far wider objects, the realization of which would, I venture to think, have given satisfaction at home, and have dissipated many misconceptions, now existing, inimical to the interests of the new proprietary. "Your letter to me of the 6th July did not reach me till the 20th, and in the meantime the newspaper notices in England led to many official and unofficial inquiries from me, involving difficulty of answer. I found, in fact, that the staff of the Hudson's Bay Company was quite at fault, and that public men in Canada misunderstood the objects of the new organization, for want of information very simple in its nature, but which--except so far as the prospectus authorized me--I had no right to supply. "Several of the Hudson's Bay Company's chief factors and traders had, it appeared, addressed a memorial to the then Governor and Committee, some months ago, upon the rumoured sale of the property, and had been, as stated to me, informed that no transfer was likely to take place, or would in fact be undertaken without previous consultation; and yet these gentlemen learnt for the first time from the public papers that new arrangements had been made. It was not unnatural, therefore, considering the relations of these gentlemen with the Company, that they should feel much annoyed; nor was it, perhaps, surprising that an influential member of the body should have predicted a general resignation of the factors 'from Labrador to Sitka,' followed by a confederation amongst them, in order to carry on the fur trade in competition with the Hudson's Bay Company, they possessing, as was said, 'the skill, the will, and the capital to do it.'