[Footnote 2: I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero. He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His parents were passengers on an English vessel which was captured by the Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where he was born on February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man of striking and handsome appearance.] VII "TALKING MUSQUASH" Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company The most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a century among the Hudson Bay Company's employés was started the other day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared with the sense of instability to which this appearance of machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual chirography such as had been received from many factories in the wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called "talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canvassers for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any other--in those posts where life has hitherto been taken so gently that when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only