A retired member of the Hudson Bay Company's staff has retired, quite well off, and has elected to remain living in the wilds of Northern Canada. He and his wife travel in Europe and elsewhere, every so often. One year, on a visit to England they are lecturing at a school, and three of the boys ask if they can come and stay for what would now be called their gap year.

They duly arrive, and the first thing is to learn to canoe. This done, they are all set for all sorts of hunting expeditions, some of which lead to quite perilous situations. In an early encounter with a bear one of the boys runs as fast as he can back home, just making it, but the native Red Indians tell him he did the wrong thing, as he ought to have backed up on a tree, and then when the bear tried to crush him to death he should have knifed the animal. Later on there is an opportunity to try this out, and it works.

There is a fascinating episode in which three young children, out looking for berries, get lost, and are literally captured by bears, and taken back to their cave. The native red Indians use their tracking skills to locate the children and free them.

That isn't all. It is a really good read, very instructive, and it makes a good audiobook, too.

Egerton Ryerson Young: a biography written while he was still alive. [The following must have been written about 1905, because Mr. Young is no longer with us. He died 5th May 1909. Ed.] Canadian Methodist Episcopalian; born at Smith's Falls, Ontario, April 7, 1840. He was educated at the Normal School of the Province of Ontario, after having taught for several years, and in 1863 entered the ministry. Four years later he was ordained, and, after being stationed at the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Hamilton, Ontario, in 1867-68, was sent as a missionary to Norway House, North-West Territory. There he worked among the Indians for five years, and in 1873 went in a similar capacity to Beren's River, Northwest Territory, where he remained three years (1873-76). In 1876 he returned to Ontario and was stationed successively at Port Perry (1876-79), Colborne (1879-82), Bowmanville (1882-85), Medford (1885-87), and St. Paul's, Brampton (1887-88). Since 1888 he has been prominent as a lecturer on work among the American Indians, and in this cause has made repeated tours of the world. He has written about a dozen books.

The above with acknowledgements to the Christiam Classic Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk