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The Romance of the Early Days 31

preached in the cook-house and had a large and
attentive congregation. I spent a week or two in |
and around Rock Bay visiting other little camps,
getting personally in touch with the men and trying

to make friends. JI found one man there from my !
own old home town of Beckwith. He had left Beck-
with fifty-one years before. His boyhood home was
within two miles of mine. He had been west in
camp, and mill, and mine all those years without
going back. We had a great talk. In the same
camp was another old hero named Donald Mc-
Gregor, one of the finest men I have ever known.
He was a sincere Christian. His Bible was always |
near, and he did a man’s work till the last. In 1862
he had worked on the Caribou road which was then
building. Having made the rounds of the camps in
the Rock Bay neighbourhood I had to then think of |
the other camps along the shore, some of them |
as far as a hundred miles away. The rare visits at |
inconvenient times of the old steamboat Casszar
made it an impracticable means of transportation.
There is a story of a proud member of the clan Mc-
Lean boasting that his clan was as old as the Flood.
On being reminded that the clan name doesn’t occur
among the occupants of Noah’s Ark he replied, “The
McLeans were even then a strong and proud people |
and they had a very fine boat of their own.” I |
decided likewise that I must have a boat of my own.
My financial position was weak but I put through

the purchase of an Indian dug-out, a rough canoe

hewed out of a log, probably very much after the