expedient to forego any direct opinion upon the case, and to administer a compound quite as innocuous in its nature as the "soothing syrup" of infantile notoriety. It was, how ever, a gratifying fact to learn next morning that--whether owing to the syrup or not, I am not prepared to state the patient had shown decided symptoms of rallying, and took my departure from Battle River with the reputation of being a "medicine-man" of the very first order. I now began to experience the full toil and labour of a winter journey. Our course lay across a bare, open region on which for distances of thirty to forty miles not one tree or bush was visible; the cold was very great, and the snow, lying loosely as it had fallen, was so soft that the dogs sank through the drifts as they pulled slowly at their loads. On the evening of the 10th January we reached a little clump of poplars on the edge of a large plain on which no tree was visible. It was piercingly cold, a bitter wind swept across the snow, making us glad to find even this poor shelter against the coming night. Two hours after dark the thermometer stood at minus 38 degrees, or 70 degrees of frost. The wood was small and poor; the wind howled through the scanty thicket, driving the smoke into our eyes as we cowered over the fire. Oh, what misery it was! and how blank seemed the prospect before me! 900 miles still to travel, and to-day I had only made about twenty miles, toiling from dawn to dark through blinding drift and intense cold. On again next morning over the trackless plain, thermometer at minus 20 in morning, and minus 12 at midday, with high wind, snow, and heavy drift. One of my men, a half-breed in name, an Indian in reality, became utterly done up from cold and exposure-the others would have left him behind to make his own way through the snow, or most likely to lie down and die, but I stopped the doggs until he came up, and then let him lie on one of the sleds for the remainder of the day. He was a miserable-looking wretch, but he ate enormous quantities of pemmican at every meal. After four days of very arduous travel we reached Carlton at sunset on the 12th January. The thermometer had kept varying between 20 and 38 degrees below zero every night, but on the night of the 12th surpassed any thing I had yet experienced. I spent that night in a room at Carlton, a room in which a fire had been burning until midnight, nevertheless at daybreak on the 13th the thermometer showed -20 degrees on the table close to my bed. At half-past ten o'clock, when placed outside, facing north, it fell to -44 degrees, and I afterwards ascertained that an instrument kept at the mission of Prince Albert, 60 miles east from Carlton, showed the enormous amount of 51 degrees below zero at daybreak that morning, 83 degrees of frost. This was the coldest night during the winter, but it was clear, calm, and fine. I now determined to leave the usual winter route from