neighborhood of our tent.  As he had seen an abundance of low dissipated life, and had a considerable fund of humor, his anecdotes were extremely amusing, especially since he never hesitated to place himself in a ludicrous point of view, provided he could raise a laugh by doing so.  Tete Rouge, however, was sometimes rather troublesome; he had an inveterate habit of pilfering provisions at all times of the day.  He set ridicule at utter defiance; and being without a particle of self-respect, he would never have given over his tricks, even if they had drawn upon him the scorn of the whole party.  Now and then, indeed, something worse than laughter fell to his share; on these occasions he would exhibit much contrition, but half an hour after we would generally observe him stealing round to the box at the back of the cart and slyly making off with the provisions which Delorier had laid by for supper.  He was very fond of smoking; but having no tobacco of his own, we used to provide him with as much as he wanted, a small piece at a time.  At first we gave him half a pound together, but this experiment proved an entire failure, for he invariably lost not only the tobacco, but the knife intrusted to him for cutting it, and a few minutes after he would come to us with many apologies and beg for more.

We had been two days at this camp, and some of the meat was nearly fit for transportation, when a storm came suddenly upon us.  About sunset the whole sky grew as black as ink, and the long grass at the river’s edge bent and rose mournfully with the first gusts of the approaching hurricane.  Munroe and his two companions brought their guns and placed them under cover of our tent.  Having no shelter for themselves, they built a fire of driftwood that might have defied a cataract, and wrapped in their buffalo robes, sat on the ground around it to bide the fury of the storm.  Delorier ensconced himself under the cover of the cart.  Shaw and I, together with Henry and Tete Rouge, crowded into the little tent; but first of all the dried meat was piled together, and well protected by buffalo robes pinned firmly to the ground.  About nine o’clock the storm broke, amid absolute darkness; it blew a gale, and torrents of rain roared over the boundless expanse of open prairie.  Our tent was filled with mist and spray beating through the canvas, and saturating everything within.  We could only distinguish each other at short intervals by the dazzling flash of lightning, which displayed the whole waste around us with its momentary glare.  We had our fears for the tent; but for an hour or two it stood fast, until at length the cap gave way before a furious blast; the pole tore through the top, and in an instant we were half suffocated by the cold and dripping folds of the canvas, which fell down upon us.  Seizing upon our guns, we placed them erect, in order to lift the saturated cloth above our heads.  In this disagreeable situation, involved among wet blankets and buffalo