e, right across her track. The
character of the steamboat chase was reversed. We turned and fled, as
the guides say, a quatre pattes, into illimitable space, trying to
get out of the way of our too powerful friend. It makes considerable
difference, in the voyage of life, whether you chase the steamboat, or
the steamboat chases you.

Meantime our other canoe had approached unseen. The steamer passed
safely between the two boats, slackening speed as the pilot caught our
loud halloo! She loomed up above us like a man-of-war, and as we climbed
the ladder to the main-deck we felt that we had indeed gotten out of the
wilderness. My old friend, Captain Savard, made us welcome. He had been
sent out, much to his disgust, to catch a runaway boom of logs and tow
it back to Roberval; it would be an all night affair; but we must take
possession of his stateroom and make ourselves comfortable; he would
certainly bring us to the hotel in time for breakfast. So he went off on
the upper deck, and we heard him stamping about and yelling to his crew
as they struggled to get their unwieldy drove of six thousand logs in
motion.

All night long we assisted at the lumbermen's difficult enterprise. We
heard the steamer snorting and straining at her clumsy, stubborn convoy.
The hoarse shouts of the crew, disguised in a mongrel dialect which made
them (perhaps fortunately) less intelligible and more forcible, mingled
with our broken dreams.

But it was, in fact, a fitting close of our voyage. For what were
we doing? It was the last stage of the woodman's labour. It was the
gathering of a wild herd of the houses and churches and ships and
bridges that grow in the forests, and bringing them into the fold of
human service. I wonder how often the inhabitant of the snug Queen
Anne cottage in the suburbs remembers the picturesque toil and varied
hardship that it has cost to hew and drag his walls and floors and
pretty peaked roofs out of the backwoods. It might enlarge his home,
and make his musings by the winter fireside less commonplace, to give a
kindly thought now and then to the long chain of human workers through
whose hands the timber of his house has passed, since it first felt the
stroke of the axe in the snow-bound winter woods, and floated, through
the spring and summer, on far-off lakes and little rivers, au large.

1894.

TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN

"Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves
fo