kets for otter-skins for their own use and comfort, but when they reached the ports of China the merchants offered such incredible sums for that accidental stock of furs that they all wanted to give up exploration and turn traders. Cook's men introduced the sea-otter to England. Furs led to the exploration of North America. The first white men on the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia, and the waters of the North, were fur-traders." When McLoughlin got started, he was a famous story-teller.
"Once, our magazines were full of unsalable bearskins. One of our chief factors selected a set of fine large skins, had them dressed in silver with the king's arms, and presented them to a royal duke. His lordship put them into his state coach and drove to court, in a fortnight every earl in England was scrambling after bear-skins." With long whiffs at their pipes they listened. McLoughlin knew the fur trade like a book.
"The Russian Empress Catharine set the fashion for sables now we have miles of traps, baited with meat and mice. England alone consumes one hundred thousand Hudson's Bay sables a year. But the beaver! I heard old gray-beards tell in my boyhood, that when a Parisian hatter set the fashion, all the young men of Canada left their seigniories and took to the woods. Their farms went back to forests. Du Luth left Montreal with eight hundred men at one time. Nobody knows how far they did go, but when they came back with their fur-filled boats they lived like kings, they dressed in lace, and wore the sword, and made Montreal a pandemonium with their drunken revels.
"Lord bless you, man, the markets of France were glutted, the ships would take no more, every warehouse in Montreal was packed, and still the brigades came
