ough.
And who were the pretty girls? Eloise, of course, and Catharine the Canadian Lily. Six weeks Ermatinger duly courted her; and then they were married. From the mouth of the Columbia there came the handsome Birnie girls, whose father, James Birnie, a genial, jolly Aberdeen Scotchman, kept the only hostelry from Vancouver to the sea and from Sitka to San Francisco. Old Astoria, renamed Fort George, had been abandoned; but after the Clatsop trouble Dr. McLoughlin had sent Birnie there to keep a lookout for passing ships. Here he cultivated a little garden, did a little Indian trading in salted salmon and sea-otter skins, kept a weather eye out on the bar over which at long intervals a ship came into the river. Astor's old post was burned; only the scarified and blackened chimney stood among the ruins that were overrun with brier and honeysuckle. The latchstring of Birnie's log house on the hillside was out to the trapper, the trader, the Indian, and the sailor. More than one old missionary has paid tribute to the housekeeping virtues of his pretty wife, the daughter of a Hudson's Bay trader in the north country. Her blazing hearth, clean-scrubbed fir floor, and neat pine table of snowy whiteness, offered cheer and comfort to all the early wanderers who came " the plains across or the Horn around." Sole Saxon of the forest, Birnie's flag was first to welcome the incoming ship, and last to wave a farewell from the shore.
Chief Factor Pambrun, the tinas tyee (little chief) that held in check the upper tribes, sent down his fair Maria, the pride of Walla Walla. Pambrun himself was a blond with thin light curls. This in his child developed into peach-bloom red and white, blue eyes, and the midnight hair of her mother rolling in her
