u,
they seem to have had a narrow escape from a _finale_ to their voyage;
their canoes being swept into the middle of the river, under an immense
fall, fifty feet in height.

They now learned the art of _bivouaching_, and after a day of toiling
through portages, reserving the severest of them, the Grand Calumet, for
the renewed vigour of the morning, they made ready for the forest night.
The description, brief as it is, is one among many which shows the
_artist_ eye.

"The tents were pitched in a small clump of pines, while round a blazing
fire the passengers were collected, amid a medley of boxes, barrels,
cloaks, and on the rock above the foaming rapids were lying the canoes;
the men flitting about the fires as if they were enjoying a holiday, and
watching a huge cauldron suspended above the fire. The whole with a
background of dense woods and a lake."

Yet, startling as this "wooing of nature" in her rough moods may seem to
the silk-and-velvet portion of the world, we doubt whether this wild
life, with its desperate toil and its ground sleep, may not be the true
charm of travel to saint, savage, or sage, when once fairly forced to
the experiment. The blazing fire, the bed of leaves, the gay supper,
made gayer still by incomparable appetite, and the sleep after all, in
which the whole outward man remains imbedded, without the movement of a
muscle and without a dream, until the morning awakes him up a new being,
are fully worth all the inventions of art, to make us enjoy rest
unearned by fatigue, and food without waiting for appetite. "The sleep
of the weary man is sweet," said the ancient and wise king who slept
among curtains of gold, and under roofs of cedar; the true way to taste
that sleep is to spend a day, dragging canoes up Indian portages, and
lie down with one's feet warmed by a pine blaze and one's back to the
shelter of a forest.

But, as the time will assuredly come when this "life in the woods" will
be no more, when huge inns will supersede the canopy of the skies, and
down beds will make the memory of birch twigs and heather blossoms pass
away, we give from authority the proceedings of an evening's rest, which
the next generation will study with somewhat of the feeling of reading
Tacitus De Moribus Germanorum.

As the sun approached his setting, every eye in the canoes, as they
pulled along, was speculating on some dry and tolerably open spot on the
shore. _That_ once found, all were on shore in an