" Two more little books with big
titles are _Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues_, and _The London Prisons, with an
Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
Them_.
But the book that most tempts our cupidity is _Memoirs of Miss A---- n,
Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars_. We want
that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
regretted our Presbyterian training.
At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
washing clothes with washboards--the old order and the new.
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