We began our second week upon the Mississippi with a breakfast of baked lake-trout, slapjacks, maple syrup and coffee, which embodied the culinary skill of the entire fleet:  then started for Winnibegoshish in the height of good spirits and physical vigor.  In one of our easy, five-miles-an-hour swings around the graceful curves we were met by a duck flying close over our heads with noisy quacks.  A little farther we came upon the cause of the bird’s lively flight in an Indian boy, not above nine years old, paddling a large birch canoe, over the gunwale of which peeped the muzzle of a sanguinary-looking old shot-gun.  The diminutive sportsman was for a moment dashed by our sudden and novel appearance, but, from the way he urged his canoe and from the determined set of his dirty face, we had small room to doubt the ultimate fate of the flying mallard.  Another curve brought us in sight of the home of the little savage, where a dozen Indians, in all stages of nudity, were encamped upon a high bluff.  A concerted whoop from our fleet brought all of them from their smoky lodges, and we swept by under their wondering eyes and exclamations.  Then the high land was left behind, and half an hour between low meadows brought us out upon the yellow sands and heaving swells of Lake Winnibegoshish, the largest in the Mississippi chain, the dimensions of which, including its lovely north-eastern bay, are about eleven by thirteen miles.  The name signifies “miserable dirty water lake,” but save a faint tinge of brown its waters are as pure and sparkling as those of any of the upper lakes.  Our entrance upon Winnibegoshish was under a driving storm of wind and mist, against which we paddled three miles to Duck Point, a slender finger of wooded sand and boulder reaching half a mile out, at whose junction with the main land is a miserable village of most villainous-looking Indians.  One man alone could speak a little English, and through him we negotiated for replenishing our provisions.  Meantime, the storm freshened and embargoed an eight-mile journey across an open and boiling sea; so we paddled to the outermost joint upon the jutting finger for a bivouac under the trees, waiting the hoped-for lull of wind and wave at sunset.  The smoke of our fire invited to our camp the hungry natives, who dogged us at every turn all the long afternoon, in squads of all numbers under twenty, and of all ages between two and seventy.  One club-footed and club-handed fellow of forbidding visage protested with hand and head that he neither spoke nor understood our vernacular.  Later, he sidled up to the Hattie’s skipper and said in an earnest sotto voce, “Gib me dime.”  Denied the dime, he intimated to the Betsy that he doted on bacon, of which we were each broiling a slice.  The Betsy’s captain was bent upon securing an Indian fish-spear, and he pantomimed to the twinkling eyes of the copper-skin that he would invest a generous chunk of bacon in barbed iron.  The Indian strode back to his village, and soon returned with the spear, which he transferred to the Betsy’s stores.