with the other men in the bottom of the boat, it was not without misgivings as to the events which lay before him in the darkness.  One man only remained up to steer, for it was my intention to run as long as the breeze, faint though it was, lasted.  I had been asleep about half an hour when I felt my arm quickly pulled, and, looking up, beheld Samuel bending over me, while with one hand he steered the boat.  “Here they are,” he whispered, “here they are.”  I looked over the gunwale and under the sail and beheld right on the course we were steering two bright fires burning close to the water’s edge.  We were running down a channel which seemed to narrow to a strait between two islands, and presently a third fire came into view on the other side of the strait, showing distinctly the narrow pass towards which we were steering, it did not appear to be more than twenty feet across it, and, from its exceeding narrowness and the position of the fires, it seemed as though the place had really been selected to dispute our outward passage.  We were not more than two hundred yards from the strait and the breeze was holding well into it.  What was to be done?  Samuel was for putting the helm up; but that would Have been useless, because we were already in the channel, and to run on shore would only place us still more in the power of our enemies, if enemies they were, so I told him to hold his course and run right through the narrow pass.  The other men had sprung quickly from their blankets, and Thomas was the picture of terror.  When he saw that I was about to run the boat through the strait, he instantly made up his mind to shape for himself a different course.  Abandoning his flint musket to any body who would take it, he clambered like a monkey on to the gunwale, with the evident intention of dropping noiselessly into the water, and seeking, by swimming on shore, a safety which he deemed denied to him on board.  Never shall I forget his face as he was pulled back into the boat; nor is it easy to describe the sudden revulsion of feeling which possessed him when:  a dozen different fires breaking into view showed at once that the forest was on fire, and that the imaginary bivouac of the French was only the flames of burning brushwood.  Samuel laughed over his mistake, but Thomas looked on it in no laughing light, and, seizing his gun, stoutly maintained that had it really been the French they would have learnt a terrible lesson from the united volleys of the fourteen-shooter and his flint musket.

The Lake of the Woods covers a very large extent of country.  In length it measures about seventy miles, and its greatest breadth is about the same distance; its shores are but little known, and it is only the Indian who can steer with accuracy through its labyrinthine channels.  In its southern portion it spreads out into a vast expanse of open water, the surface of which is lashed by tempests into high-running seas.

In the early days of the French fur trade it yielded large stores of beaver and of martens, but it has long ceased to be rich in furs.  Its shores and islands will be found to abound in minerals whenever civilization reaches them.