The Tables In The Great Banqueting Room Groaned Under
The Weight Of Game Of All Kinds; Of Venison From The Woods, And
Fish From The Lakes, With Hunters' Delicacies, Such As Buffalos'
Tongues, And Beavers' Tails, And Various Luxuries From Montreal,
All Served Up By Experienced Cooks Brought For The Purpose.
There
was no stint of generous wine, for it was a hard-drinking period,
a time of loyal toasts, and bacchanalian songs, and brimming
bumpers.
While the chiefs thus revelled in hall, and made the rafters
resound with bursts of loyalty and old Scottish songs, chanted in
voices cracked and sharpened by the northern blast, their
merriment was echoed and prolonged by a mongrel legion of
retainers, Canadian voyageurs, half-breeds, Indian hunters, and
vagabond hangers-on who feasted sumptuously without on the crumbs
that fell from their table, and made the welkin ring with old
French ditties, mingled with Indian yelps and yellings.
Such was the Northwest Company in its powerful and prosperous
days, when it held a kind of feudal sway over a vast domain of
lake and forest. We are dwelling too long, perhaps, upon these
individual pictures, endeared to us by the associations of early
life, when, as yet a stripling youth, we have sat at the
hospitable boards of the "mighty Northwesters," the lords of the
ascendant at Montreal, and gazed with wondering and inexperienced
eye at the baronial wassailing, and listened with astonished ear
to their tales of hardship and adventures. It is one object of
our task, however, to present scenes of the rough life of the
wilderness, and we are tempted to fix these few memorials of a
transient state of things fast passing into oblivion; for the
feudal state of Fort William is at an end, its council chamber is
silent and deserted; its banquet hall no longer echoes to the
burst of loyalty, or the "auld world" ditty; the lords of the
lakes and forests have passed away; and the hospitable magnates
of Montreal where are they?
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