Macleod quickly reported himself ready. Then Captain So-and-So asked him to bring something or other from camp, and Lieutenant What’s-his-name wanted him to carry a message to a comrade, and non-coms. and men had requests galore for parcels and other truck until poor Macleod had more commissions than a corporal’s guard could execute in a fortnight. He remarked—sarcastic like—that perhaps it would be easier to march the whole column from Batoche back to the boat than “to git all them things,” so it was decided that someone or other should accompany him. Why that someone should have been myself does not after all these years appear very clearly to me, nor did it then; but Colonel Bedson—God rest his soul—suggested that I should go and even if we didn’t return the naval brigade would not be so seriously handicapped as to render it entirely ineffective. That settled it; so Macleod and I—a humble newspaper correspondent—and Peter Hourie’s pony which was attached to Peter Hourie’s buckboard, kindly loaned for the occasion—Peter was an interpreter—started out on our mission. A well-beaten trail led due south through dense woods, and we followed it for five or six miles and then the freshly broken turf showed that the column had turned sharp to the left, and paralleled the river towards Batoche, marching through a park-like country with bluffs and openings and dotted with little ponds. There was a remarkable similarity in the surroundings for many a mile, so much so that one portion was confusingly like another—but it was a winsome scene whose restfulness and calm were accentuated by the jarring discordant events of previous days. In these northern latitudes, Nature is unusually lavish with her gifts and here she had created a picturesque demesne that was remindful of well-kept ancestral estates in the Old Country. It was Nature in her simple beauty—unadorned except with that adornment which the hand of the Master alone can give. It was the summer dreamland—a scenic poem—a fragment of incomparable Kentish landscape in a glorious Canadian setting. Lost on the Trail