It was the meeting-place between the Montreal partners and voyageurs, and those who coursed the boundless expanse of the distant west. To the wintering clerks and partners, after their hardships and fasts in the interior, Fort William seemed a foretaste of Paradise, and a hundred journals of a hundred traders tell again the tale of a dream of distant Fort William, which, in the midst of cold, hunger and desolation, cheered the wanderer's heart and lightened his burdens. For the voyageurs it was all in all. To reach Fort William, enjoy the carnival, and betwixt drink and riotous living dissipate the hard-earned wages of years was to them often the happiness of earth and heaven combined. [Sidenote: Fort William described.] It was in the great dining-hall that there centred the chief glory of Fort William. Of noble proportions was it, and capable of entertaining two hundred persons, and here fully two hundred sat when the news from Red River reached them. Let us attempt to describe the scene. There on a glittering pedestal looked down on the joyous company a marble bust of Simon McTavish; while ever and anon the eye of some struggling clerk or ambitious partner would be attracted by a row of paintings, depicting to the life the magnates of the North, and rest with ecstasy upon those gleaming eyes and rubicund cheeks, cheerful prophesies of his own roseate future. Not all were portraits of opulent Northmen--other heroes lent the glory of their visages to this spacious hall--the King in his majesty, the Prince Regent, and Admiral the Lord Nelson. A gigantic painting of the memorable battle of the Nile also adorned the walls. At the upper end hung a huge map of the Indian country, drawn by David Thompson, he who had written at the crisis of his career, "To-day I left the services of the Hudson's Bay Company to join the North-West, and may God help me." On this extraordinary production were inscribed in characters bold enough to be seen by the humblest _engagé_ at the farthest end of the great hall, the whole number of the Company's trading posts from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific Ocean, from Sault Ste. Marie to Athabasca and the Great Slave Lake. Many a time and oft while the feast was at its height and the wine bottles of the partners were being broached and the rum puncheons tapped, was a glance cast at some spot on that map which marked months of suffering, the death place of a comrade, the love of an Indian maiden, a thrilling adventure, a cruel massacre, painful solitude, great rejoicing or a bitter disappointment.