Daylight came at last, but still the rain hissed down, making it no easy matter to boil our kettle and fry our bit of pork.  Then we put out for the day’s work on the river.  How bleak and wretched it all was!  After a while we found it was impossible to make head against the storm of wind and rain which swept the water, and we had to put back to the shelter of our miserable camp.  About seven o’clock the wind fell, and we set out again.  Soon the sun came forth drying and warming us all over.  All day we paddled on, passing in succession the grand Chute-a-Jacquot, the Three Portages-des-Bois, the Slave Falls, and the dangerous rapids of the Barriere.  The Slave Falls! who that has ever beheld that superb rush of water will forget it?  Glorious, glorious Winnipeg! it may be that with these eyes of mine I shall never see thee again, for thou liest far out of the track of life, and man mars not thy beauty with ways of civilized travel; but I shall often see thee in imagination, and thy rocks and thy waters shall murmur in memory for life.

That night, the 17th of August, we made our camp on a little island close to the Otter Falls.  It came a night of ceaseless rain, and again the mail-bags underwent a drenching.  The old Indian cleared a space in the dripping vegetation, and made me a rude shelter with branches woven together; but the rain beat through, and drenched body, bag, and baggage.  And yet how easy it all was, and how sound one slept! simply because one had to do it; that one consideration is the greatest expounder of the possible.  I could not speak a word to my Indians, but we got on by signs, and seldom found the want of speech—­“ugh, ugh” and “caween,” yes and no, answered for any difficulty.  To make a fire and a camp, to boil a kettle and fry a bit of meat are the home works of the Indian.  His life is one long picnic, and it matters as little to him whether sun or rain, snow or biting frost, warm, drench, cover, or freeze him, as it does to the moose or the reindeer that share his forest life and yield him often his forest fare.  Upon examining the letters in-the morning the interior of the bags presented such a pulpy and generally deplorable appearance that I was obliged to stop at one of the Seven Portages for the purpose of drying Her Majesty’s mail.  With this object we made a large fire, and placing cross-sticks above proceeded to toast and grill the dripping papers.  The Indians sat around, turning the letters with little sticks as if they were baking cakes or frying sturgeon.  Under their skilful treatment the pulpy mats soon attained the consistency, and in many instances the legibility, of a smoked herring, but as they had before presented a very fishy appearance that was not of much consequence.