Snowflakes and Sunbeams | Page 9

cap in
hand, near the door.
"Charley, my boy," began Mr. Grant, standing with his back to the fire,
his feet pretty wide apart, and his coat-tails under his arms-- "Charley,
my boy, your father has just been speaking of you. He is very anxious
that you should enter the service of the Hudson's Bay Company; and as
you are a clever boy and a good penman, we think that you would be
likely to get on if placed for a year or so in our office here. I need
scarcely point out to you, my boy, that in such a position you would be
sure to obtain more rapid promotion than if you were placed in one of
the distant outposts, where you would have very little to do, and
perhaps little to eat, and no one to converse with except one or two men.
Of course, we would merely place you here on trial, to see how you
suited us; and if you prove steady and diligent, there is no saying how
fast you might get on. Why, you might even come to fill my place in
course of time. Come now, Charley, what think you of it?"
Charley's eyes had been cast on the ground while Mr. Grant was
speaking. He now raised them, looked at his father, then at his
interrogator, and said,--

"It is very kind of you both to be so anxious about my prospects. I
thank you, indeed, very much; but I--a--"
"Don't like the desk?" said his father, in an angry tone. "Is that it, eh?"
Charley made no reply, but cast down his eyes again and smiled
(Charley had a sweet smile, a peculiarly sweet, candid smile), as if he
meant to say that his father had hit the nail quite on the top of the head
that time, and no mistake.
"But consider," resumed Mr. Grant, "although you might probably be
pleased with an outpost life at first, you would be sure to grow weary
of it after the novelty wore off, and then you would wish with all your
heart to be back here again. Believe me, child, a trader's life is a very
hard and not often a very satisfactory one--"
"Ay," broke in the father, desirous, if possible, to help the argument,
"and you'll find it a desperately wild, unsettled, roving sort of life, too,
let me tell you! full of dangers both from wild beast and wild men--"
"Hush!" interrupted Mr. Grant, observing that the boy's eyes kindled
when his father spoke of a wild, roving life, and wild beasts.--"Your
father does not mean that life at an outpost is wild and interesting or
exciting. He merely means that--a--it--"
Mr. Grant could not very well explain what it was that Mr. Kennedy
meant if he did not mean that, so he turned to him for help.
"Exactly so," said that gentleman, taking a strong pull at the pipe for
inspiration. "It's no ways interesting or exciting at all. It's slow, dull,
and flat; a miserable sort of Robinson Crusoe life, with red Indians and
starvation constantly staring you in the face--"
"Besides," said Mr. Grant, again interrupting the somewhat unfortunate
efforts of his friend, who seemed to have a happy facility in sending a
brilliant dash of romantic allusion across the dark side of his
picture--"besides, you'll not have opportunity to amuse yourself, or to
read, as you'll have no books, and you'll have to work hard with your

hands oftentimes, like your men--"
"In fact," broke in the impatient father, resolved, apparently, to carry
the point with a grand _coup_--"in fact, you'll have to rough it, as I did,
when I went up the Mackenzie River district, where I was sent to
establish a new post, and had to travel for weeks and weeks through a
wild country, where none of us had ever been before; where we shot
our own meat, caught our own fish, and built our own house--and were
very near being murdered by the Indians; though, to be sure, afterwards
they became the most civil fellows in the country, and brought us
plenty of skins. Ay, lad, you'll repent of your obstinacy when you come
to have to hunt your own dinner, as I've done many a day up the
Saskatchewan, where I've had to fight with red-skins and grizzly bears
and to chase the buffaloes over miles and miles of prairie on
rough-going nags till my bones ached and I scarce knew whether I sat
on--"
"Oh," exclaimed Charley, starting to his feet, while his eyes flashed and
his chest heaved with emotion, "that's the place for me, father!-- Do,
please, Mr. Grant send me there, and I'll work for you with all my
might!"
Frank Kennedy was not a man to