We shook him off as soon as we could, but not till after he had time to propose that we should wait till the next day, and to utter the maxim, “Whisky, good—­too much whisky, no good.”

In a log-cabin, which some half-breeds were engaged in building, we found two men who were easily persuaded to leave their work and pilot us over the rapids.  They took one of the canoes which lay in a little inlet close at hand, and entering it, pushed it with their long poles up the stream in the edge of the rapids.  Arriving at the head of the rapids, they took in our party, which consisted of five, and we began the descent.  At each end of the canoe sat a half-breed, with a paddle, to guide it while the current drew us rapidly down among the agitated waters.  It was surprising with what dexterity they kept us in the smoothest part of the water, seeming to know the way down as well as if it had been a beaten path in the fields.

At one time we would seem to be directly approaching a rock against which the waves were dashing, at another to be descending into a hollow of the waters in which our canoe would be inevitably filled, but a single stroke of the paddle given by the man at the prow put us safely by the seeming danger.  So rapid was the descent, that almost as soon as we descried the apparent peril, it was passed.  In less than ten minutes, as it seemed to me, we had left the roar of the rapids behind us, and were gliding over the smooth water at their foot.

In the afternoon 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.