At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not of turtle or venison he dreams; no vision of callipash or callipee, no mocking simulacrum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot, no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul; but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul loveth. He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the precincts of Hudson’s Bay; and not a little influenced by a genuine love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff that makes a Van Diemen. From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly expresses the fact, ‘on their own hook.’ Geoffrey suggests that they should found a city, by and by, after the manner of classical adventurers: whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire of the West. ‘Hossack’s Gate would be rather a good name for it,’ he says, between two puffs of his meerschaum; ‘and our descendants would doubtless be known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.’ ‘We Chermans have giv more names to blaizes than you Englishers,’ chimes in Mr. Schanck with dignity. ‘It is our dalend to disgover.’ ‘I wish you’d disgover something to eat, then, my friend Absalom,’ replies the Oxonian irreverently; ‘that mouthful of pemmican Lucius doled out to us just now has only served as a whet for my appetite. Like the half-dozen Ostend oysters they give one as the overture to a French dinner.’ ‘Ah, they are goot the oysders of Osdend,’ says Mr. Schanck with a sigh, ‘and zo are ze muzzles of Blankenberk. I dreamt ze ozer night I vas in heafen eading muzzles sdewed in _vin de madère_.’ ‘Don’t,’ cries Geoffrey emphatically; ‘if we begin to talk about eating, we shall go mad, or eat each other. How nice you would be, Schanck, stuffed with chestnuts, and roasted, like a Norfolk turkey dressed French fashion! It’s rather a pity that one’s friends are reported to be indigestible; but I believe that’s merely a fable, designed as a deterring influence. The Maories cannibalised from the beginning of time; fed in and in, as well as bred in and in. One nice old man, a chieftain of Rakiraki, kept a register of his own consumption of prisoners, by means of a row of stones, which, when reckoned up after the old gentleman’s demise, amounted to eight hundred and seventy-two: and yet these Maories were a healthy race enough when civilisation looked them up.’