f winter. They have often been found frozen and revived by
warmth, nor is it possible that the multitude which incessantly filled
our ears with its discordant notes could have been matured in two or
three days.

The fishermen at Beaver Lake, and the other detached parties were
ordered to return to the post. The expedients to which the poor people
were reduced, to cross a country so beset with waters, presented many
uncouth spectacles. The inexperienced were glad to compromise, with the
loss of property, for the safety of their persons, and astride upon
ill-balanced rafts with which they struggled to be uppermost, exhibited
a ludicrous picture of distress. Happy were they who could patch up an
old canoe, though obliged to bear it half the way on their shoulders,
through miry bogs and interwoven willows. But the veteran trader, wedged
in a box of skin, with his wife, children, dogs, and furs, wheeled
triumphantly through the current, and deposited his heterogeneous cargo
safely on the shore. The woods re-echoed with the return of their exiled
tenants. An hundred tribes, as gaily dressed as any burnished natives of
the south, greeted our eyes in our accustomed walks, and their voices,
though unmusical, were the sweetest that ever saluted our ears.

From the 19th to the 26th the snow once more blighted the resuscitating
verdure, but a single day was sufficient to remove it. On the 28th the
Saskatchawan swept away the ice which had adhered to its banks, and on
the morrow a boat came down from Carlton House with provisions. We
received such accounts of the state of vegetation at that place, that
Dr. Richardson determined to visit it, in order to collect botanical
specimens, as the period at which the ice was expected to admit of the
continuation of our journey was still distant. Accordingly he embarked
on the 1st of May.

In the course of the month the ice gradually wore away from the south
side of the lake, but the great mass of it still hung to the north side
with some snow visible on its surface. By the 21st the elevated grounds
were perfectly dry, and teeming with the fragrant offspring of the
season. When the snow melted, the earth was covered with the fallen
leaves of the last year, and already it was green with the strawberry
plant, and the bursting buds of the gooseberry, raspberry, and rose
bushes, soon variegated by the rose and the blossoms of the choke
cherry. The gifts of nature are disregarded and undervalued