I have often, when walking under the trees where these half-torpid monarchs of the air sit side by side, fired and knocked one out from betwixt its neighbours, without causing them the slightest apparent alarm; three I picked up one morning frozen stiff as marble, having fallen dead from off their perch. Why birds so powerfully winged should prefer to remain where the winters are sufficiently intense to freeze them to death, rather than go southward, where food is equally abundant, is a mystery I am unable to explain. Towards the fall of the year, when the hunting and fishing-grounds of the Old-man (_Sea-la-ca_, as the Indians designate the eagle, on account of its _white head_) grow scant of game, hunger prompts them to be disagreeably bold. Constantly a fat mallard, that I had taken a vast amount of trouble to stalk, was pounced upon by a watchful eagle, and borne off, ere the report of my gun was lost in the hills, or the smoke had cleared away; indeed, I have sometimes given the robber the benefit of a second barrel, as punishment for his thievery. Numberless ducks have been lost to me in this way. This eagle is by far the most abundant of the falcon tribe in British Columbia, and always a conspicuous object in ascending a river; he is seated on the loftiest tree or rocky pinnacle, and soars off circling round, screaming like a tortured demon, as if in remonstrance at such an impudent intrusion into its solitudes. The adult plumage is not attained until the fourth year from the nest. MOSQUITOS (_Culex pinguis_, nov. sp.)—Reader, if you have never been in British Columbia, then, I say, you do not know anything about insect persecution; neither can you form the faintest idea of the terrible suffering foes so seemingly insignificant as the bloodthirsty horsefly (_Tabanus_), the tiny burning fly (beulot or sand-fly of the trappers), and the well-known and deservedly-hated _mosquito_, are capable of inflicting. A wanderer from my boyhood, I have met with these pests in various parts of our globe—in the country of Czernomorzi, among the Black Sea Cossacks, on the plains of Troy, up on Mount Olympus, amid the gorgeous growths of a tropical forest, where beauty and malaria, twin brothers, walk hand-in-hand—away in the deep dismal solitudes of the swamps on the banks of the Mississippi, on the wide grassy tracts of the Western prairies, and on the snow-clad summits of the Rocky Mountains. Widely remote and singularly opposite as to climate as are these varied localities, yet, as these pests are there in legions, I imagined that I had endured the maximum of misery they were capable of producing. I was mistaken; all my experience, all my vaunted knowledge of their numbers, all I had seen and suffered, was as nothing to what I subsequently endured. On the Sumass prairie, and along the banks of the Fraser river, the mosquitos are, as a Yankee would say, ‘a caution.’