Now And Then, At An Interval Of Years, They Were
Permitted To Come Down On A Visit To The Establishment At
Montreal, To Recruit Their Health, And To Have A Taste Of
Civilized Life; And These Were Brilliant Spots In Their
Existence.
As to the principal partners, or agents, who resided in Montreal
and Quebec, they formed a kind of commercial aristocracy, living
in lordly and hospitable style. Their posts, and the pleasures,
dangers, adventures, and mishaps which they had shared together
in their wild wood life, had linked them heartily to each other,
so that they formed a convivial fraternity. Few travellers that
have visited Canada some thirty years since, in the days of the
M'Tavishes, the M'Gillivrays, the M'Kenzies, the Frobishers, and
the other magnates of the Northwest, when the company was in all
its glory, but must remember the round of feasting and revelry
kept up among these hyperborean nabobs.
Sometimes one or two partners, recently from the interior posts,
would make their appearance in New York, in the course of a tour
of pleasure and curiosity. On these occasions there was a degree
of magnificence of the purse about them, and a peculiar
propensity to expenditure at the goldsmith's and jeweler's for
rings, chains, brooches, necklaces, jeweled watches, and other
rich trinkets, partly for their own wear, partly for presents to
their female acquaintances; a gorgeous prodigality, such as was
often to be noticed in former times in Southern planters and West
India creoles, when flush with the profits of their plantations.
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