south as well as to the north of us. The good clergyman had also induced several families of Indians to settle in the neighbourhood, and that they seemed to have accepted with joy the glad tidings of salvation which he had been the means of offering them.

“I wish that Sigenok would come and join them then,” exclaimed Malcolm warmly; “so brave and energetic a man would bring many others over to the truth.”

The next day Sigenok himself came in to see us. Malcolm opened the subject of which he had been speaking. Sigenok listened attentively, and said that he would go and hear what the missionary had to say. He did so.

The winter set in, and the river and lake were frozen over, and the ground was covered with snow, and sleighs had taken the place of carts, and thick buffalo-skin coats of light dress, and stoves were lighted and windows closed, and the whole face of Nature seemed changed. Sigenok came to us. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “when I knew you first my heart was like the great prairie when the fire has passed over it, all black and foul; now it is white like that field of glittering snow on which we gaze. I am a Christian; I look with horror on my past life, and things which I considered before praiseworthy and noble, I now see to be abominable and vile.”

Day after day, in spite of cold and wind and snow, did Sigenok come up to the missionary’s house to receive instruction in the new faith which had brought such joy to his heart. Many followed in his footsteps, and there now exists a whole village of Christian Indians in the settlement who have put away and for ever their medicine men and their charms, and their false Manitou, and their cruelties and bloodthirstiness, and are worshippers of the true God in sincerity and simplicity of faith. Several of the Indian boys brought up at the school have obtained a considerable amount of learning, and some are ordained ministers of the gospel, and others catechists and schoolmasters at various missionary stations scattered throughout the wide extent of Rupert’s Land.

You may like to hear something more about that wonderful land, that terra ignota of British Central America. At the time of which I have been speaking it was supposed that the only fertile land was to be found on the banks of the Red River, but it is now ascertained that an extremely rich and fertile belt extends from the Red River right across the continent, for eight hundred miles or more, to the base of the Rocky Mountains, where it unites with the new province of Columbia. This fertile belt is capable of 

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