This day was bright and fine.  Notwithstanding the delay caused by drying the mails, as well as distributing them to the several brigades which we overhauled and passed, we ran a distance of forty miles and made no less than fifteen portages.  The carrying or portaging power of the Indian is very remarkable.  A young boy will trot away under a load which would stagger a strong European unaccustomed to such labour.  The portages and the falls which they avoid bear names which seem strange and un meaning but which have their origin in some long-forgotten incident connected with the early history of the fur trade or of Indian war.  Thus the great Slave Fall tells by its name the fate of two Sioux captives taken in some foray by the Ojibbeway; lashed together in a canoe, they were the only men who ever ran the Great Chute.  The rocks around were black with the figures of the Ojibbeways, whose wild triumphant yells were hushed by the roar of the cataract; but the torture was a short one; the mighty rush, the wild leap, and the happy hunting-ground, where even Ojibbeways cease from troubling and Sioux warriors are at rest, had been reached.  In Mackenzie’s journal the fall called Galet-du-Bonnet is said to have been named by the Canadian voyageurs, from the fact that the Indians were in the habit of crowning the highest rock above the portage with wreaths of flowers and branches of trees.  The Grand Portage, which is three quarters of a mile in length, is the great test of the strength of the Indian and half-breed; but, if Mackenzie speaks correctly, the voyageur has much degenerated since the early days of the fur trade, for he writes that seven pieces, weighing each ninety pounds, were carried over the Grand Portage by an Indian in one trip, 630 pounds borne three quarters of a mile by one man—­the loads look big enough still, but 250 pounds is considered excessive now.  These loads are carried in a manner which allows the whole strength of the body to be put into the work.  A broad leather strap is placed round the forehead, the ends of the strap passing back over the shoulders support the pieces which, thus carried, lie along-the spine from the small of the back to the crown of the head.  When fully loaded, the voyageur stands with his body bent forward, and with one hand steadying the “pieces,” he trots briskly away over the steep and rock-strewn portage, his bare or mocassined feet enable him to pass nimbly over the slippery rocks in places where boots would infallibly send portager and pieces feet-foremost to the bottom.

In ascending the Winnipeg we have seen what exciting toil is rushing or breasting up a rapid.  Let us now glance at the still more exciting operation of running a rapid.  It is difficult-to find in life any event which so effectually condenses intense nervous sensation into the shortest possible space of time as does the work of shooting, or running an immense rapid.  There is no toil, no heart-breaking labour about it, but as much coolness, dexterity,