on us like demons. We were dressed in woollens, our
hands were in dogskin gloves and our heads and necks in thick calico
hoods and capes, but all such protections were naught when those
screaming villains had a mind for blood. At one onslaught they would go
into the shrinking flesh through two thicknesses of wool and two of
cotton, or through a heavy dogskin glove, or through the thick and
hardened skin of the hand's palm or the foot's ball, or through a
buckskin moccasin and cotton hose--through any protection at our command
except a cotton canopy hung wide of our heads and bodies.

Sung and stung out of all endurance by the very centre of that army of
the wilderness, we were astir in the grayest of our second Thursday's
dawn, and were soon in readiness for our final portage over the crests
of the Heights of Land to the river, which out of our long and severe
march had become to us a veritable Mecca. Our way was up a gentle range
of hills, whose tops, but a few yards wide, divide the waters which flow
southward to the great Gulf from those which seek their far northward
trend through the Red River of the North. The first division of our
party reached the Mississippi before noon with a joy born out of a
week's toil and hardship, and in a trice I was drinking of and laving in
its swift, bright water. We could hardly realize that in this deep,
rushing brook, not more than four or five paces wide, we saw the
beginnings of that majestic current which drains half a continent. Soon
our second division came up, we ate our last lunch in company, and the
Indians, each shaking us by the hand with a grunt and a smile, then
going off into the forest with a cheer, left us alone in that vast and
uninhabited wilderness. Late in the afternoon we launched our canoes
into the little river, and loaded them for our journey to its head,
camping about three miles above our point of embarkation.

[Illustration: HEAD OF THE MISSISSIPPI.]

The next morning we started with light hearts upon what we supposed
would be but a short journey to the river's source, to meet an
exasperating disappointment. We had made a bargain for transportation
from the railway to Itasca Lake or to a point five miles below, all
fully diagrammed and understood by correspondence, but found ourselves
set down by the employes of the rascally half-breed--who had been
careful to leave us at Wild Rice Lake--in an unknown land, six days from
civilization, at a point nearly o