Fetch camp from Loop Valley.-A breakfast party.-Illecellewaet.— A miner's camp.

AFTER a good night's rest on our bed, in which the angles of the boulders made themselves very distinctly felt, we rose refreshed, and after breakfast made up two light packs and set off down the valley. As the stream was not at this early hour swollen to its full height, we were able to follow its bed for most of the way, and so avoided the difficulties of the forest. We thus reached the bottom of the valley in about an hour and a half from our camp, and, ascending the slope at the side of the high trestle-bridge, gained the railway track, which we followed till we reached Glacier House. A good dinner came in well after

CH. XII.]

NEW CURE FOR BRONCHITIS.

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camp meals, and oh! for the delight of getting out of one's clothes after being in them for nearly a week, and the luxury of a bath, to say nothing of a bed without boulders for feathers.

Next morning we set off down the track again to fetch our tent and blankets from the Loop valley. A number of men were engaged on this portion of the railway, felling timber, building a snow-shed and repairing the line. While H. returned to Glacier to fetch a part of his camera which he had left behind, I accepted an invitation from the workmen to join them at breakfast. Amongst them were the two youths who had been our companions on the glacier field. Others of them had long experience in the mountains, and their yarns were full of interest. One rather elderly man said that he had just returned from a fine spree at Donald. He had got invalided with bronchitis and was sent down on full pay to hospital; but on reaching Donald he found that there was a bad fever case in the hospital, so not caring for such company he met a "pal" with whom he went on the spree; they spent all their money, and now he was back to his work feeling. quite well. It did not seem a good argument for teetotalism, and was possibly a somewhat inaccurate account; but I mildly suggested that he was an old idiot, at his time of life, not to be laying by some money for a rainy day; and, as this was Saturday, I asked him to come up and join us at divine service the next afternoon. Не

promised to do so and “would also bring some of the boys along." When Sunday came he was as good as his word.

As we went on our way down the track we met another gang of fine-looking fellows coming up to work at felling trees. Two days afterwards they were swinging round a tree to shoot it down the mountain side. It slipped before they were ready, five of them were knocked over, more or less hurt, and one had his brains dashed out. Such is life in the Selkirks!

As we were both armed with our

cameras we took

a series of views on our way up to camp; and then halting to enjoy our last meal in the Loop valley we shouldered the remaining swags and reached Glacier House for supper.

We had heard much of the mines in the mountains near Illecellewaet, about fifteen miles to the westward, and as Mr. Corbin, the owner of some of them, invited us to go down to him for a couple of days, we determined to accept his invitation. He promised us horses to ride over a high range whence we could get good views of the mountains we had been at work amongst, and which would help us much with our map. Sunday was spent at Glacier House, and on Monday, August 13th, we left for Illecellewaet in company with Mr. Bell-Smith who hoped to make studies for future pictures. Mr. Corbin met us on the platform and we spent a pleasant evening in his shanty with his friends, all of them

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attractive.

AN "AL-FRESCO" TOILET.

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concerned in prospecting and mining. Of all occupations, that of the prospector seems to be the most Once a man tastes the charm of the wild woods and secluded mountain glens, with the adventures incident on such a life, and has all this stimulated by the prospects of a trump card turning up in the shape of a lode of silver ore or a sand bar of gold, everything else in the world seems flat. It is wrong to think that such men are always dare-devil desperadoes, given up to wild dissipation and excess, like the picture of them usually drawn in story-books. Here we were in the midst of prospectors of the most enthusiastic type, all ready to face cheerily any hardship or danger, and as good fellows as you could meet with anywhere in the world. Nature in its wildness had humanized them. Its beauty was the charm of their lives, and the language by which every tree, and plant, and rock, and torrent spoke to them, had become so much a part of their existence, that life on the plain or in the centres of civilization would be for them the same as banishment.

As Mr. Corbin had no shake-down for us, we went to sleep at one of the inns. In fact the only one running; for in consequence of bad work going on, the sheriff had come along and shut up the other. The washing-basin for all guests was in the yard on a tree root. A strip of leather nailed to the side of the house and a piece of broken looking-glass

provided shavers with all the necessaries of life, but we were snug enough, though the house stood on legs in a big pool of water caused by the overflow of the river. Some trees had been felled to make room for the "city," but, as the custom in British Columbia is, when felling a big tree to fix in its side a spring board on which the men stand, and cut it across at about eight or ten feet from the ground, they leave a stump most difficult to get rid of, and here were these great stumps, charred by fire mixed up among the wooden houses. The city seemed to have no plan, but on the map which we saw it was laid out in the most splendid series of lots, and two steamers were represented as plying on the river-which, by the way, is a glacier torrent flowing at about twenty miles per hour.

Late in the evening a train of thirty mules arrived from the mines belonging to the Selkirk Mining Company with heavy loads of galena fixed on the pack-saddles by means of the famous diamond hitch. The packs were taken off, laid in a row before the office, and the mules turned into an inclosure, where they rolled and refreshed themselves after their long day's work.

Next morning after an early breakfast Mr. Corbin had four horses ready, one for each of us and one for himself. His companion Mr. Ben Macord, known as "Mountaineer Ben," accompanied us on foot. Macord