,
men will pass over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have
done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The
canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pass over till it dips
like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous,
reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot
our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong
to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my
Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into
which thirty feet of canoe was raised.

Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment
of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about _manna_ in
the wilderness! _money_ in the wilderness came to the poor souls
impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above
that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill of
delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a decent-looking
man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to
the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I
remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, "Well, you see, sir, we
get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o' _delicacy_ with us."

Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there
is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to _live_. One day we
came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good
land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county
court for amusement. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat,
an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or
holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept,
each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness
was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of
which the poorest English peasant _knows_ something, yet every one of
these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty.

One night we stopped at the house of a man who was said to possess
$150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His
two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about
smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do
try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she