ed by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is
very near the Inland Sea.

It comes as discoveries nearly always come--his finding of the Great
Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way
ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the
region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters--long
lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels.
Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy
smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of
sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose
itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your
view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber
waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island,
islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted
pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these
islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you
see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You
are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on
the lake for hours. One {54} can guess how Champlain's men scrambled
from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep
pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering
vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.

But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With
the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him
down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from
French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these
little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of
forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians
back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.

Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron
tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time
more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children.
Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were
sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple
palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century
before.

Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail
to the Huron villages. Here he