bath. Then I went on a steamer that holds thirty carloads of freight in the bottom. We went north all the way until we came to the Great Slave Lake Region. We got off just this side of it in the wilderness. There are no autos in here. There are nine white people at Fort Vermilion, the Governor, doctor, Mounted Police, Hudson Bay man, and so forth. Get a map and find the Great Slave Lake. A little south of itthat's here. Boy has already had two invitations from Indians to go trapping with them there when he gets a bit older.

The Calgary, Edmonton, and Peace River Town districts are settled with farms till it looks like a checkerboard. Here is the primeval wilderness. Unless I have the dog with me I never dare go out of sight of the house, as I get lost so easily. The white settler's wife and children have to climb a tree quite frequently when picking berries to see in what direction to go home. As there are no roads in the sea, so there are none here.

February 12, 1927

I have now been in bed one week. Last night was a good night and I feel rested and easy to-day. Just a week ago I fell, striking my back on a small bag of frozen salt in the tent. I walked back to my little house, undressed, and crept into bed, and there I've been ever since. It will be two weeks yet before I can walk. I found the hurt place in the Anatomy. The hurt is on the right side.

I lie on my left side. To-day Daddy raised me up in a reclining position which feels very nice. Boy is the cook, and by following my directions does real well and bakes good bread. Sets sponge at night just like any good housekeeper. There does n't seem to be anything out of joint and we're so far from a doctor that at a dollar a mile

the price is prohibitive unless something is really broken. The Indians are doctored free, but not white people. Doctors should be free to all people. I'll never have another doctor's bill hanging over me if I can get well without. So tired I won't write any

more now.

March 1, 1927

Still in bed, but better. Next week I'll be up again. It was a slight sprain and much bruised. Daddy is baking meat and potatoes for our lunch. Boy is in bed with acute bronchitis. Running out while warm into the cold without a coat must have caused it, but Daddy is bringing him around in good shape. He smokes him every day for the cough. Pours oil of pine tar on hot coals and makes him breathe the smoke. It loosens the cough up fine.

The Party. The Preacher said, 'Now you'll see some fancy clothes.' 'What! Do they wear fancy clothes?' said I. "The Duskies do,' says he. As I had only met one Indian squaw all summer, I looked forward to seeing the others. I received the surprise of my life. He calls the Indian and breed women 'the Duskies.' They were dressed in the latest fashion. Knee-length gowns, bobbed hair, flesh-colored silk stockings with bright flowers embroidered on. the knees. Their gowns were of bright silk, and they were so painted and powdered the men looked black in comparison. Dancing the breakdown they grew so excited that Cree and Beaver war whoops made my back hair rise up in horror. I thought they'd start scalping next, but a glance across the room at the gleaming pistols and full cartridge belt of the Mounted Police reassured me. Nearly all had come in dog sleds.

My little house. I love it. There is only one room in it, but I would n't

trade it for a mansion. I could n't make a dugout in the hill, so then I started a log cabin. Eight logs were laid when the cold came. Such a cold! The thermometer dropped steadily and we all cut wood to keep from freezing to death in the tent. We put up the big heater, but had to wear our coats to keep the cold from our backs. We lived from day to day. Building was out of the question. The intense cold just made the meat on our bones vanish away, and we ate all the time, all we could.

Thanksgiving Day came, and just at dusk Mr. L. drove up with four teams and sleds loaded and three other white men and one breed. They brought everything with them and, with the thermometer at forty below zero, put up my little house in six days and had us moved in. I fed them. They could just get in around the stove, but they were a jolly crew. They made big fires outside to get warm by. The icicles hung from their eyelashes in the intense cold, and they danced war dances around the fires and whooped to get warm. Mr. L. has a small saw outfit and saws lumber, and he brought odds and ends he had on hand. The foundation was logs and they even dug me a small cellar. I shall pay for the material and time, of course. But it was queer how they arrived just in the nick of time. Daddy was in bed for a week in the little house just from the cold. Nothing the matter with him at all. The cold grew worse until it was fortynine below by my thermometer and sixty below by self-registering ones. Was n't I glad we had a shelter at last!

Been feeling blue because I had no luck trapping, nearly sick with worry, when like a bolt from the blue came good news and a check! Look in the February number of the Atlantic Monthly in the back in the Contributors'

Column. 'It can't be true,' I say to myself a dozen times a day. Mrs. A. sent my letters in to the magazine and they accepted them. I can't believe it. A grubstake for the coming winter; able to pay my debts and buy some clothes for Boy, right out of the blue sky!

The piano was never unpacked and the last thing the men did was to set it up in the little house.

Perhaps you have already seen the Atlantic. I received the February number and the check February 20. I did n't fret any more about staying in bed. Your letter and package came on that day, too, and Boy's book and all the reading for me. You are too good. How can I ever pay it back! Everybody is too good to me.

March 14, 1927

I was afraid you might worry about me, so I'll write a few lines to tell you that the young doctor was out to see me and he examined my back and said it would be all right, but that one kidney was still sore. He left me a heap of pills of many colors which I won't take. The Government furnishes us a doctor and this lad is a dear child just out of college. He is very busy and has a hard row to hoe up here doctoring Indians. I did n't send for him, for I can't afford such luxuries. He came anyway. I guess the breeds must have told him I'd never walk again. I can't walk much yet, but I take a few steps every day now. We had a nice visit and he told me all about college days. It was real nice of him to come sixty miles with a cold north wind blowing, but he said that was nothing. He often went one hundred and fifty miles when it was colder. Some life.

night and it's still snowing, but it will go as soon as the wind changes. As soon as the ice goes out the mail will come in. I hope it goes soon. I am planning a vegetable garden and am going to farm all I can. The summer is short, but it's almost continuous daylight and things do grow. I feel lonesome to-day and wish there were some other woman to talk to besides the one in the looking-glass. I'm not well enough to be outside and I'm tired of the inside. The mail will be so welcome.

PEACE RIVER, ALBERTA May 4, 1927

We're expecting the boat this week with mail. I feel better- have it checked again. Spring is here, and birds. It's so lovely it hurts. Ducks and geese and frogs make the air noisy, and birds everywhere. I am so happy.

May 19, 1927

The mail came in two days ago and I have a chance maybe to mail this card as the boat goes back. I'll try, anyway. Medicine came, and just what I needed. My back is nearly well. I only feel it when I stoop over. I'm late with my garden and so busy. Had a heap of letters. Books and papers all arrived. The B. cape kept Daddy's head from freezing all winter. He even took it to bed with him. We have a fresh cow this month and lots of milk.

FORT VERMILION, ALBERTA May 21, 1927 Spring is here at last and the grass is green. Flowers are springing up everywhere and wild strawberries are in bloom. There was quite a severe frost a couple of nights ago that may have injured them. The mosquitoes are also with us now. If this land ever

gets settled up they won't be bad, but as it is now they are fierce. We sleep under a mosquito bar at night, made of cheesecloth so the little ones can't crawl through. They will stay with us now until fall comes with sharp frost. But they are bearable. Summer seems to come as if by magic. There really is hardly any spring. To-day is Sunday, I believe. I am never sure of the days in the calendar. I studied the Bible a bit and found that the word 'hell' means 'the grave' in many places in the Bible. I have heard people call this north country by both these names, but I need never do that now that people outside know I'm here. I feel as if I have known all you folks all along, but you did n't know about me.

The weeks and months and years slip by and the old struggle for existence goes on., It's been a fight to keep the intellect alive. Do you think I'll ever be able to write for a living? I can devote a little time every day to study even when I am busy with the garden, and during the long winter there is too much time on my hands. The dark comes too quickly and then stays so long.

What a lovely place I have for a home! The river forms a perfect half circle around us, and there is a hill behind us that shuts out the north wind. The homestead is flooded below the hill until June. It makes fine hay. On one side is a small lake that never goes dry. About eighty acres large. We are all alone.

I was counting on catching fur, and there is n't any and won't be for three years if I can exist till then. I must write, for, while I hope to grow most of what we eat, we need to buy some things and freights are so high in here.

I find that I am treated with great respect by the men in here. That's because they admire a woman who'll

follow her man into the wilderness and stay with him. They look tough, but inside they're homesick for some old mother, and always, of course, with the longing for a woman's sympathy and love, which is the gnawing hunger of lonely men. The trappers are coming out of the bush on their way to the trading posts or to the 'outside.' Their sleeping bags are filled with duck feathers and quilted. It's really just a large comforter; and they roll up in them and sleep right in the snow even when it's sixty to seventy below

zero.

I have gone back to when the world is still young. Civilization is gone and only the little band of lonesome women here remember it. I have a pretty little buckskin Indian pony, but have n't dared to ride yet, as my back is still a little lame. But it is passing away and I am getting stronger every day.

May 31, 1927

Boy and I went hunting yesterday together for the first time this year. He got four ducks, each time he shot getting his bird. The fifth time he shot he killed his duck, but she floated out of reach and the water was too deep for him to wade in after her. He can't swim yet very well, and I can't either.

Of those he brought home, two were big mallards, one was an Indian duck, and the other was a spoonbill. It's all the meat we have and it's very good. He is really getting to be a very good shot.

Meat is very scarce here some years and has been so for quite a few years now, the Indians say. It's too far north and the country is so large, and wolves keep it down, too. But ducks are good as long as they last. After a while there will be prairie chickens. There are small deer here, but they are very scarce. I have never seen one. In the muskegs there are moose, but except in winter they are impassable. Bands of large wolves feed on them. It's such a big, wild country big lakes, rivers, and muskegs; no trails and no people. Less than two human beings to each thousand square miles, and that means Indians, too. I won't admit out loud that I'm lonesome, but it's a Robinson Crusoe existence. Like being alive yet buried. Books will save my reason, and letters. Trappers tell me no white woman from the outside can stand it longer than six years. I'll have to show them.

ADVERTISING men sometimes call advertising 'business insurance,' and wonder why men who insure the world against every imaginable catastrophe do not insure their own business against the destructive power of silence.

If advertising is business insurance, why do not insurance companies advertise? The few who do are glorious pioneers and worthy of all praise, but the sum total of their efforts is far too small to form that body of advertising which is necessary to create a new public opinion. Just how small that sum total is may be estimated by comparing figures for a few selected advertising mediums. In this comparison and in the course of this article the word 'insurance' is used to cover all forms of insurance, not only the grand divisions known as life, fire, accident, indemnity, and marine, but protection against other catastrophes quaintly described in the contracts as 'acts of God.' The various applications of insurance vary greatly one from another as the actuary or underwriter regards them, but they all have one quality in common: they lack and need that form of public good will which can come only from public knowledge.

In twelve leading magazines, as checked by the Curtis Publishing Company, the total expenditure to advertise insurance in 1926 was $1,064,269, while for the motor car and its accessories it was $30,955,298. The twelve magazines checked, while few numerically,

afford what the statistical 'sharps' call a good cross section. It is safe to say that, were the comparison extended to include all advertising mediums, the odds in favor of the motor car would be greater. It is sufficient for our purpose to leave them at thirty to one. The question is, what peculiar need, or urgency, or intrinsic quality makes it profitable to advertise motor cars thirty times as much as insurance is advertised? What has the motor car in the way of interest, importance, necessity, desirability, or potential market that insurance does not possess? Measured by human needs and human standards, insurance goes deeper, is more potent to stir our emotions, and has a profounder influence on our destinies. Insurance companies are selling an almost priceless commodity -protection, freedom from worry, peace of mind. As old Omar said of the wine-sellers:

I wonder often what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

Certainly they do not buy advertising. In proportion to its opportunity, insurance has never been advertised. Insurance is sold by an army of salesmen, patient, resourceful, and intelligent, whose ingenuity is taxed to offset and overcome the reticence of the companies that employ them. The present volume, admittedly large, is due to their untiring industry, unaided by receptive knowledge on the part