due to the chief for this early visit; but I told him that
being on my way to meet the great Ogima whose braves were coming from the
big sea water, I could not pass the Indian camp without stopping to say
good-bye.

Before any thing else could be said I shook Prince by the hand and walked
back towards the river.

By this time, however, the whole camp was thoroughly aroused. From each
lodge came forth warriors decked in whatever garments could be most
easily donned.

The chief gave a signal, and a hundred trading-guns were held aloft and a
hundred shots rang out on the morning air. Again and again the salutes
were repeated, the whole tribe moving down to the water's edge to see me
off. Putting out into the middle of the river, I discharged my four teen
shooter in the air in rapid succession; a prolonged war whoop answered my
salute, and paddling their very best, for the eyes of the finest canoers
in the world were upon them, my men drove the little craft flying over
the water until the Indian village and its still firing braves were
hidden behind a river bend. Through many marsh-lined channels, and amidst
a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks the
waters of Lake Winnipeg. A mixture of land and water, of mud, and of the
varied vegetation which grows thereon, this delta of the Red River is,
like other spots of a similar description, inexplicably lonely.

The wind sighs over it, bending the tall reeds with mournful rustle, and
the wild bird passes and repasses with plaintive cry over the rushes
which form his summer home.

Emerging from the sedges of the Red River, we shot out into the waters of
an immense lake, a lake which stretched away into unseen spaces, and over
whose waters the fervid July sun was playing strange freaks of mirage and
inverted shore land.

This was Lake Winnipeg, a great lake even on a continent where lakes are
inland seas. But vast as it is now, it is only a tithe of what it must
have been in the earlier ages of the earth.

The capes and headlands of what once was a vast inland sea now stand far
away from the shores of Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles from its present
limits these great landmarks still look down on an ocean, but it is an
ocean of grass. The waters of Winnipeg have retired from their feet, and
they are now mountain ridges rising over seas of verdure. At the bottom
of this bygone lake lay the whole valley of the Red River, the present
Lakes Winnipegoos and