he sun like a field of ice. There were paddles in
each canoe of the same material. The lovers were prepared for this by
the tradition of their fathers, which informed them that a canoe of
stone was the conveyance by which they were to reach the happy mansions.
They also knew that each soul must have its separate conveyance, because
the passage was to give rise to the judgment which permitted them to sit
down in the happy dwellings, or doomed them to the punishment prepared
for the wicked. Casting off the rope of sand, each stepped into a canoe,
and committed it to the Water of Judgment. Who can describe their joy
and satisfaction, when they found that, though the actions of their
life-time had not been entirely pure; though the man had sometimes
slaughtered more musk-oxen than he could eat, speared salmon to be
devoured by the brown eagle, and gathered rock-moss to rot in the rain;
though he had once made mock of a priest, and once trembled at the
war-cry of the Knisteneaux, and once forgotten to throw into the fire
the tongue of a beaver as an offering to the Being who bade it cross his
hunting-path in a season of scarcity; and though the maiden had suffered
her father to wear tattered mocassins, and her brothers broken
snow-shoes, and thought of her lover when she should have been thinking
of the Master of Life--still the canoes did not sink, but floated slowly
on, level with the water, towards the Happy Island. They found that the
paddles were not needed--once passed the Judgment test, once pronounced
fit for the happy lands, the canoe moved, self-impelled, to the
appointed harbour. As they floated onwards, their eyes and ears were
pained by a thousand sights and sounds of horror. Now they saw a canoe
sink from under the person it was appointed to judge--a father, perhaps,
with his children in view; a husband, or wife, or friend, with the
object dearest to their hearts, to listen to the bubling cry of their
agony, as they sank to their chins in the water, there to remain for
ever, beholding and regretting the rewards enjoyed by the good, and
doomed to struggle, till the stars shall cease to shine, in unavailing
endeavours to reach the blissful island. They beheld the lake thick and
black with the heads of the unhappy swimmers, as the surface of the
Great Bear Lake is dotted in summer with the wild fowl that seek
subsistence in its bosom.

At length the happy pair reached the island. It is impossible to tell
the delig