the whispers of the pine-tree, the
music of running water, the stillness of great lonely lakes.

On the evening of the fifth day from leaving Fort Alexander we reached
the foot of the Rat Portage, the twenty-seventh, and last, upon the
Winnipeg River; above this portage stretched the Lake of the Woods, which
here poured its waters through a deep rock-bound gorge with tremendous
force. During the five days we had only encountered two solitary Indians;
they knew nothing whatever about the Expedition, and, after a short
parley and a present of tea and flour, we pushed on. About midday on the
fourth day we halted at the Mission of the White Dog, a spot which some
more than heathen missionary had named Islington in a moment of virtuous
cockneyism. What could have tempted him to commit this act of desecration
it is needless to ask.

Islington on the Winnipeg! O religious Gilpin, hadst thou fallen a prey
to savage Cannibalism, not even Sidney Smith's farewell aspiration would
have saved the savage who devoured you, you must have killed him.

The Mission of the White Dog had been the scene of Thomas Hope's most
brilliant triumphs in the role of schoolmaster, and the youthful
Ojibbeways of the place had formerly belonged to the band of hope. For
some days past Thomas had been labouring under depression, his power of
devouring pemmican had, it is true, remained unimpaired, but in one or
two trying moments of toil, in rapids and portages, he had been found
miserably wanting; he had, in fact, shown many indications of utter
uselessness; he had also begun to entertain gloomy apprehensions of what
the French would do to him when they caught him on the Lake of the Woods,
and although he endeavoured frequently to prove that under certain
circumstances the French would have no chance whatever against him, yet,
as these circumstances were from the nature of things never likely to
occur, necessitating, in the first instance, a presumption that Thomas
would show fight, he failed to convince not only his hearers, but
himself, that he was not in a very bad way. At the White Dog Mission he
was, so to speak, on his own hearth, and was doubtless desirous of
showing me that his claims to the rank of interpreter were well founded.
No tidings whatever had reached the few huts of the Indians at the White
Dog; the women and children, who now formed the sole inhabitants, went
but little out of the neighbourhood, and the men had been away for many
d