adjuncts of the British Empire, but King Charles did not know nor care much more about it than the French king who later on gave up Canada with a light heart, saying it was only "a few hundred acres of snow." It is not our duty in this book to follow the fortunes of "the Governor and Company of the Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" as the Royal Charter described this little band of less than a score of men to whom had been handed over the control of half a continent. It is enough to say that the Hudson's Bay Company, as the popular habit of shortening long titles rendered it, held this vast region for two whole centuries. During that time the immense resources of the country tempted others to disregard the monopolistic provisions of the Royal Charter and to venture in upon forbidden ground. Companies such as the North-West Fur Company, formed by the Scottish merchants of Montreal, rushed to secure part of the rich harvest in trade that was being reaped by the English Company, whose employees, it may be said, were largely the hardy Scots from the Highlands and Islands. But the leaders of the Hudson's Bay Company, "stabbed broad awake" by this opposition and strengthened by the trustworthiness and endurance of their employees, held their ground and extended their operations till they by degrees absorbed all opponents and became in 1821 monarchs of all they surveyed. Meanwhile in the Old Land many things of world-wide interest and influence had been transpiring. The years around the opening of the nineteenth century were made stormy by the Napoleonic effort to subjugate Europe and while their men of military age were away fighting for the liberty of Europe against "the little giant of Corsica," certain areas in the north of Scotland were "cleared" of their inhabitants by heartless landlords who felt that sheep were more profitable for the owner of estates than human tenants. To these evicted crofters in the Highlands came that noble altruist and philanthropic colonizer, the Earl of Selkirk, who, having obtained from the Hudson's Bay Company an immense district principally in what is now Manitoba, offered the outcasts of a tyrannous land system homes in the great free spaces of Rupert's Land, as the Hudson Bay territory was called. The offer was accepted thankfully, and in the years from 1812 to 1815 these Selkirk colonists came to the Red River of the North. It is not part of this story to follow the fortunes of these famous colonists of whom I have written more particularly in _The Romance of Western Canada_. They encountered unaccustomed climatic obstacles, they were persecuted and hunted by the fur-trading opponents of their benefactor, they were tried by the disasters of floods and by plagues of devouring locusts, but with the dogged and stern determination of their race and creed they held on and demonstrated to the world the possibilities of a country which is now the granary of the Empire.