Then when the shadows of the night had fallen around and all was silent, save the river’s tide against the rocks, we would stretch our blankets on the springy moss of the crag and lie down to sleep with only the stars for a roof.

Happy, happy days were these—­days the memory of which goes very far into the future, growing brighter as we journey farther away from them, for the scenes through which our course was laid were such as speak in whispers, only when we have left them—­the whispers of the pine-tree, the music of running water, the stillness of great lonely lakes.

On the evening of the fifth day from leaving Fort Alexander we reached the foot of the Rat Portage, the twenty-seventh, and last, upon the Winnipeg River; above this portage stretched the Lake of the Woods, which here poured its waters through a deep rock-bound gorge with tremendous force.  During the five days we had only encountered two solitary Indians; they knew nothing whatever about the Expedition, and, after a short parley and a present of tea and flour, we pushed on.  About midday on the fourth day we halted at the Mission of the White Dog, a spot which some more than heathen missionary had named Islington in a moment of virtuous cockneyism.  What could have tempted him to commit this act of desecration it is needless to ask.

Islington on the Winnipeg!  O religious Gilpin, hadst thou fallen a prey to savage Cannibalism, not even Sidney Smith’s farewell aspiration would have saved the savage who devoured you, you must have killed him.

The Mission of the White Dog had been the scene of Thomas Hope’s most brilliant triumphs in the role of schoolmaster, and the youthful Ojibbeways of the place had formerly belonged to the band of hope.  For some days past Thomas had been labouring under depression, his power of devouring pemmican had, it is true, remained unimpaired, but in one or two trying moments of toil, in rapids and portages, he had been found miserably wanting; he had, in fact, shown many indications of utter uselessness; he had also begun to entertain gloomy apprehensions of what the French would do to him when they caught him on the Lake of the Woods, and although he endeavoured frequently to prove that under certain circumstances the French would have no chance whatever against him, yet, as these circumstances were from the nature of things never likely to occur, necessitating, in the first instance, a presumption that Thomas would show fight, he failed to convince not only his hearers, but himself, that he was not in a very bad way.  At the White Dog Mission he was, so to speak, on his own hearth, and was doubtless desirous of showing me that his claims to the rank of interpreter were well founded.  No tidings whatever had reached the few huts of the Indians at the White Dog; the women and children, who now formed the sole inhabitants, went but little out of the neighbourhood, and the men had been away for many days in the forest, hunting and fishing.