was, however, soon ended, when I suddenly felt the boat touch the rocky bank, and heard the boatmen protesting they would go no further that night.  We were nearly three miles below Peterborough, and how I was to walk this distance, weakened as I was by recent illness and fatigue of our long travelling, I knew not.  To spend the night in an open boat, exposed to the heavy dews arising from the river, would be almost death.  While we were deliberating on what to do, the rest of the passengers had made up their minds, and taken the way through the woods by a road they were well acquainted with.  They were soon out of sight, all but one gentleman, who was bargaining with one of the rowers to take him and his dog across the river at the head of the rapids in a skiff.

Imagine our situation, at ten o’clock at night, without knowing a single step of our road, put on shore to find the way to the distant town as we best could, or pass the night in the dark forest.

Almost in despair, we entreated the gentleman to be our guide as far as he went.  But so many obstacles beset our path in the form of newly-chopped trees and blocks of stone, scattered along the shore, that it was with the utmost difficulty we could keep him in sight.  At last we came up with him at the place appointed to meet the skiff, and, with a pertinacity that at another time and in other circumstances we never should have adopted, we all but insisted on being admitted into the boat.  An angry growling consent was extorted from the surly Charon, and we hastily entered the frail bark, which seemed hardly calculated to convey us in safety to the opposite shore.

I could not help indulging in a feeling of indescribable fear, as I listened to the torrent of profane invective that burst forth continually from the lips of the boatman.  Once or twice we were in danger of being overset by the boughs of the pines and cedars which had fallen into the water near the banks.  Right glad was I when we reached the opposite shores; but here a new trouble arose:  there was yet more untracked wood to cross before we again met the skiff which had to pass up a small rapid, and meet us at the head of the small lake, an expansion of the Otanabee a little below Peterborough.  At the distance of every few yards our path was obstructed by fallen trees, mostly hemlock, spruce, or cedar, the branches of which are so thickly interwoven that it is scarcely possible to separate them, or force a passage through the tangled thicket which they form.

Had it not been for the humane assistance of our conductor, I know not how I should have surmounted these difficulties.  Sometimes I was ready to sink down from very weariness.  At length I hailed, with a joy I could hardly have supposed possible, the gruff voice of the Irish rower, and, after considerable grumbling on his part, we were again seated.