Poke the fires,—­pile the coals!  Again we dash onwards—­again we reach midway—­again the moment of struggle—­again the ignominy of defeat—­again the council of war in the stiller waters below.  We now summon all our energies, determined that defeat shall but nerve us to greater exertion.  We go lower down, so as to obtain greater initial velocity; the fires are made to glow one spotless mass of living heat.  Again the charge is sounded:  on we rush, our little boat throbbing from stem to stern; again the angry waters roar defiance—­again the deadly struggle—­again for a moment we tremble in the balance of victory.  Suddenly a universal shout of triumph is heard, and as the joyous cheers die in echoes through the forest, we are breasting the smoother waters of the Ottawa above the rapids.

This is all very well on paper, but I assure you it was a time of intense excitement to us; if in the moment of deadly struggle the tiller ropes had broken, or the helmsman had made one false turn of the wheel, we might have got across the boiling rapids, and then good-bye to sublunary friends; our bones might have been floating past Quebec before the news of our destruction had reached it.

The Ottawa is by no means the only channel in these parts for conveying the produce of the lumberer’s toil:  there are tributaries innumerable, affording hundreds of miles of raft navigation; so that an almost indefinite field for their labour is open, and years, if not centuries, must elapse before the population can increase sufficiently to effect any very material inroad on these all but inexhaustible forests.

After proceeding a few miles beyond the scene of our late severe struggle, we reached the little village of Portage du Fort, above which the rapids are perfectly impassable.  The inhabitants of this little wild forest community are not very numerous, as may be supposed, and the only object of interest is a flour-mill, which supplies the lumberers for many miles, both above and below.  Our little steamer being unable to ascend higher, we were compelled to make a Scotchman’s cruise of it—­“There and bock agin.”  So, turning our head eastward, we bowled along merrily with the stream, dashing down our late antagonist like a flash of lightning, then across the lake, and through a fleet of bannered rafts, till we landed on the Chats Falls Island, where we found our ponies ready to whisk us along the mid-air railway.  Re-embarking on the steamer of the morning, we found a capital dinner ready for us, and ere the shades of evening had closed in, we were once more enjoying the hospitalities of Aylmer.