dian, I little
marvelled that the red child of the lakes and the woods should be loth to
quit such scenes for all the luxuries of our civilization. Almost as I
thought with pity over his fate, seeing here the treasures of nature
which were his, there suddenly emerged from the forest two dusky forms.'
They were Ojibbeways, who came to share our fire and our evening meal.
The land was still their own. When I lay down to rest that night on the
dry sandy shore, I long watched the stars above me. As children sleep
after a day of toil and play, so slept the dusky men who lay around me.
It was my first night with these poor wild sons of the lone spaces; it
was strange and weird, and the lapping of the mimic wave against the
rocks close by failed to bring sleep to my thinking eyes. Many a night
afterwards I lay down to sleep beside these men and their brethren--many
a night by lake-shore, by torrent's edge, and far out amidst the
measureless meadows of the West--but "custom stales" even nature's
infinite variety, and through many wild bivouacs my memory still wanders
back to that first night out by the shore of Lake Winnipeg.

At break of day we launched the canoe again and pursued our course for
the mouth of the Winnipeg River. The lake which yesterday was all
sunshine, to-day looked black and overcast--thunder-clouds hung angrily
around the horizon, and it seemed as though Winnipeg was anxious to give
a sample of her rough ways before she had done with us. While the morning
was yet young we made a portage--that is, we carried the canoe and its
stores across a neck of land, saving thereby a long paddle round a
projecting cape. The portage was through a marshy tract covered with long
grass and rushes. While the men are busily engaged in carrying across the
boat and stores, I will introduce them to the reader. They were four in
number, and were named as follows:-Joseph Monkman, cook and interpreter;
William Prince, full Indian; Thomas Smith, ditto; Thomas Hope, ci-devant
schoolmaster, and now self-constituted steersman. The three first were
good men. Prince, in particular, was a splendid canoe-man in dangerous
water. But Hope possessed the greatest capacity for eating and talking of
any man I ever met. He could devour quantities of pemmican any number of
times during the day, and be hungry still. What he taught during the
period when he was schoolmaster I have never been able to find out, but
he was popularly supposed at the miss