we engaged a half-breed and his brother to take us over
to the Canadian shore. His wife, a slender young woman with a lively
physiognomy, not easily to be distinguished from a French woman of her
class, accompanied us in the canoe with her little boy. The birch-bark
canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect
things of the kind constructed by human art. We were in one of the finest
that float on St. Mary's river, and when I looked at its delicate ribs,
mere shavings of white cedar, yet firm enough for the purpose--the thin
broad laths of the same wood with which these are inclosed, and the broad
sheets of birch-bark, impervious to water, which sheathed the outside, all
firmly sewed together by the tough slender roots of the fir-tree, and when
I considered its extreme lightness and the grace of its form, I could not
but wonder at the ingenuity of those who had invented so beautiful a
combination of ship-building and basket-work. "It cost me twenty dollars,"
said the half-breed, "and I would not take thirty for it."

We were ferried over the waves where they dance at the foot of the rapids.
At this place large quantities of white-fish, one of the most delicate
kinds known on our continent, are caught by the Indians, in their season,
with scoop-nets. The whites are about to interfere with this occupation of
the Indians, and I saw the other day a seine of prodigious length
constructing, with which it is intended to sweep nearly half the river at
once. "They will take a hundred barrels a day," said an inhabitant of the
place.

On the British side, the rapids divide themselves into half a dozen noisy
brooks, which roar round little islands, and in the boiling pools of which
the speckled trout is caught with the rod and line. We landed at the
warehouses of the Hudson Bay Company, where the goods intended for the
Indian trade are deposited, and the furs brought from the northwest are
collected. They are surrounded by a massive stockade, within which lives
the agent of the Company, the walks are graveled and well-kept, and the
whole bears the marks of British solidity and precision. A quantity of
furs had been brought in the day before, but they were locked up in the
warehouse, and all was now quiet and silent. The agent was absent; a
half-breed nurse stood at the door with his child, and a Scotch servant,
apparently with nothing to do, was lounging in the court inclosed by the
stockade; in short, there