fund, for when the Company wanted favors it openly sent purses of gold or beaver stockings or cat-skin counterpanes. But farther on in the minutes, when the good secretary had forgotten all about secrecy, I found a cryptic entry about the cryptic gentleman, Mr. Andrew Vallentine—“that all entries about Mr. Andrew Vallentine’s office for the service of the Company be made in a Booke Aparte,” and that 10 per cent. of the regular yearly dividends go as dowries for the brides of the apprentices, the ceremonies to be performed—not by any unfrocked clergyman under the rose—but by the Honorable, the Very Reverend Doctor Sacheverell of renown. The business with the gentleman of matrimonial fame was not called “a marriage office.” No such clumsy herding of fair ones to the altar, as in Virginia and Quebec, where brides were sent in shiploads and exposed on the town square like slaves at the shambles. The Company’s matrimonial venture was kept in dignified reserve, that would send down no stigma to descendants. It was organized and designated as a separate _company_; certainly, a company of two. Later on, Mr. Vallentine’s office being too small for the rush of business, the secretary, “_Mr. Potter is ordered to arrange a larger office for Mr. Vallentine in the Buttery of the Company’s store house._” But all the delightful possibilities hidden in Mr. Vallentine’s suggestive name and in the oleaginous place which he chose for his matrimonial mart—failed to make the course of true love run smooth. Mr. Vallentine entangled the Company in lawsuits and on his death in 1731, the office was closed. _Notes on Foregoing Chapters._—Groseillers’s name is given in a variety of ways, the full name being Medard Chouart Groseillers—the last translated by the English as “Goosebery,” which of course would necessitate the name being spelled “Groseilliers.” The account of the passage of the ships across the Atlantic is drawn from Radisson Journals, from his Petitions, and from the Journal of Gillam as reported by Thomas Gorst, Bayly’s secretary. There are also scraps about the trip in Sir James Hayes’ report of damage to _The Eaglet_, which he submitted to the Admiralty. The relationship of Radisson to Groseillers and the French version of the quarrel on the bay—are to be found in the life of Radisson in _Pathfinders of the West_. Though I have searched diligently, I have not been able to find a single authority, ancient or modern, for the odd version given by several writers of Radisson and Groseillers absconding overland to New France. The statement is sheer fiction—neither more nor less, as the Minutes of Hudson’s Bay House account for Radisson’s movements almost monthly from 1667 to 1674, when he left London for France.