Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 29).djvu/255

 The number of servants at Edmondton, including children, is about eighty. They form a {187} well-regulated family. Besides a large garden, a field of potatoes and wheat, belonging to the establishment, the lakes, forests, and plains of the neighborhood furnish provisions in abundance. On my arrival at the Fort, the ice-house contained thirty thousand white fish, each weighing four pounds, and five hundred buffaloes, the ordinary amount of the winter provisions. Such is the quantity of aquatic birds in the season, that sportsmen often send to the Fort carts full of fowls. Eggs are picked up by thousands in the straw and reeds of the marshes.

The greater number of those employed being Catholics, I found sufficient occupation. Every morning I catechized the children, and gave an instruction; in the evening, after the labors of the day, I recited the prayers for the honorable Commander and his servants. I must acknowledge, to the credit of the inhabitants of Edmondton, that their assiduity and attention to religious duties, and the kindness and respectful regard evinced for me, were a source of great consolation during my sojourn of two months among them. May God, who has granted them so liberally and plentifully the dews of the earth, enrich them likewise with those of Heaven; {188} such is the most sincere wish and prayer of a friend who will never forget them.

I visited Lake St. Anne, the ordinary residence of Messrs. Thibault and Bourassa; the latter gentleman was absent. The distance from the fort to the lake is about fifty miles. I mentioned this interesting mission in my preceding letters, and I will now say a word relative to the country.—The surface of this region is flat for the most part, undulating in some places—diversified with forests and meadows, and lakes teeming with fish. In Lake St. Anne