It had been a gallant fight, in which the native qualities of both races had been seen to advantage. Ardent, brave, adventurous, the Frenchman had ever been the best of pioneers. With a faculty for acquiring languages and dialects, he quickly adapted himself to the ways of the Indian, won their sympathy, and treated them with an equality and freedom which made their path of peaceful conquest easy and trade a cheerful jugglery. From first to last there entered into the life of the French trader and adventurer an element of patriotism and romance--conquest for conquest's sake and for the glory of French enterprise. He must ever remain the more eloquent, the more picturesque figure, the more admired pioneer of the Far North. But his rival, the Briton, had qualities which outwore him, and the patriarchal and stable methods of the Hudson's Bay Company prevailed in the end. The heroic age of the Company had passed away; and now a long and uneventful period began, in which, as in the Middle Ages, the energies of men were slowly gathering for the more strenuous activity of modern conditions. "_Pro pelle cutem_," the chosen motto of the Company, was perhaps humorously understood as conveying loosely the notion of an exchange of peltries; for certainly the vindictive principle, "a skin for a skin," did not mark their dealings with the Indian tribes. From the first they were fortunate in encountering more peaceable races than those opposing the colonists further south; and a regular trade was conducted upon the basis of a fixed scale of values, the unit of calculation being one beaver skin. Thus a gun could be procured for eight, or ten, or twelve winter beavers, according to the classification of the skin by size and weight. One beaver was the equivalent of a hatchet, or four pounds of shot, or half a pound of beads, or a pound of tobacco. A laced coat was worth six beavers, and a looking-glass and comb cost two beavers; and so on through all the luxuries and necessities of Indian life, other pelts being always reduced to the terms of beaver skins.