that were not baited for them; and best of all, high-bred onananiche,
pleasant to capture and delicate to eat.

Our second camp was on a sandy point at the sunset end of the lake--a
fine place for bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows and blueberry
patches, where Damon went to hunt for bears. He did not find any; but
once he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he thought was a bear;
and he declared that he got quite as much excitement out of it as if it
had had four legs and a mouthful of teeth.

He brought back from one of his expeditions an Indian letter, which he
had found in a cleft stick by the river. It was a sheet of birch-bark
with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; five Indians in a canoe paddling
up the river, and one in another canoe pointing in another direction; we
read it as a message left by a hunting party, telling their companions
not to go on up the river, because it was already occupied, but to turn
off on a side stream.

There was a sign of a different kind nailed to an old stump behind
our camp. It was the top of a soap-box, with an inscription after this
fashion:

A.D. MEYER & B. LEVIT
Soap Mfrs. N. Y.
CAMPED HERE JULY 18--
1 TROUT 17 12 POUNDS. II OUAN
ANISHES 18 12 POUNDS. ONE
PIKE 147 12 LBS.

There was a combination of piscatorial pride and mercantile enterprise
in this quaint device, that took our fancy. It suggested also a curious
question of psychology in regard to the inhibitory influence of horses
and fish upon the human nerve of veracity. We named the place "Point
Ananias."

And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely spot, and not even the Hebrew
inscription could spoil the sense of solitude that surrounded us when
the night came, and the storm howled across the take, and the
darkness encircled us with a wall that only seemed the more dense and
impenetrable as the firelight blazed and leaped within the black ring.

"How far away is the nearest house, Johnny?"

"I don't know; fifty miles, I suppose."

"And what would you do if the canoes were burned, or if a tree fell and
smashed them?"

"Well, I'd say a Pater noster, and take bread and bacon enough for
four days, and an axe, and plenty of matches, and make a straight line
through the woods. But it wouldn't be a joke, M'sieu', I can tell you."

The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchitagama flows without a break,
is the noblest of all the s