the converts one by one joining him, and singly became encircled in the shining waves:  many of them were aged and bowed with time, and now took up the cross in their declining days; and others of the young and fair, who sought their creator in youth.  It was wondrous now to think of this once lonely stream of the western world, the Indian’s own Ounagandy.  A few years since no voice had broke on its solitude save the red man’s war-whoop, or his shrieking death song—­no form been shadowed on its depths but the wild bird’s wing, or the savage speeding on the blood chase.  Now its living pictures told the holy records of the blessed east, and its waters typed the healing stream of Jordan.  After some more singing and prayers offered for the newly-baptized, the ceremony was finished.  ’Tis strange that on these dipping occasions no cold is caught by the converts.  I suppose the excitement of the mind sustains the body; but persons are often baptised in winter, in an opening made through the ice for the purpose, and walk with their garments frozen around them without inconvenience, seeming to prove the efficacy of hydropathy, by declaring how happy and comfortable they feel.  We, at the conclusion of the prayers, left the place, and proceeded homewards in a canoe; this is a mode of locomotion much liked by the river settlers, but to a stranger anything but agreeable.  They glide along the waters swift and smooth, but a slight cause upsets them, and as perhaps you are not exactly certain about being born to be hanged, you must sit perfectly still—­you are warned to do this, but if you are the least nervous, you will hardly dare to breathe, much less move, and this, in a journey of any length, is not so pleasant.  This feeling, however, custom soon dispels; and when one sees little fairy girls paddling themselves and a cargo of brothers and sisters to school, or women with babies taking their wool to the carding mill, they feel ashamed, and learn to keep the true balance.

Our light skiff, or bark rather, as it might be truely styled, being a veritable Indian canoe, made of birch bark most cunningly put together, these being so light as to float in shallow water, and to be easily removed, are for this reason preferred by the Indians to more solid materials, who carry them on their backs from stream to stream during their peregrinations through the country, soon bore us over the diamond water, whose mirrored surface we scarcely stirred, to the landing place, whose marshy precincts were now all gemmed with the golden and purple flowers of the sweet flag or calamus; and as the sun was yet high in the glorious blue, we resolved to spend the remainder of the day with a family living near; feeling, in this land of New Brunswick, no qualms about a sudden visitation, knowing that a people so proverbial for being “wide awake” can never be taken unawares.  Their dwelling, a large frame building painted most gaily in the bright warm hues the old Dutch fancies of the