from his greed.  He takes his pound of flesh anywhere, and does not scruple to take the blood with it.  As a rule you can defend yourself, to some degree, against him, by wearing a head-net, tying your sleeves around your wrists and your trousers around your ankles, and anointing yourself with grease, flavoured with pennyroyal, for which cleanly and honest scent he has a coarse aversion.  But sometimes, especially on burned land, about the middle of a warm afternoon, when a rain is threatening, the horde of black flies descend in force and fury knowing that their time is short.  Then there is no escape.  Suits of chain armour, Nubian ointments of far-smelling potency, would not save you.  You must do as our guides did on the portage, submit to fate and walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris “bleeding at every pore,”—­or do as Damon and I did, break into ejaculations and a run, until you reach a place where you can light a smudge and hold your head over it.

“And yet,” said my comrade, as we sat coughing and rubbing our eyes in the painful shelter of the smoke, “there are worse trials than this in the civilised districts:  social enmities, and newspaper scandals, and religious persecutions.  The blackest fly I ever saw is the Reverend -----” but here his voice was fortunately choked by a fit of coughing.

A couple of wandering Indians—­descendants of the Montagnais, on whose hunting domain we were travelling—­dropped in at our camp that night as we sat around the fire.  They gave us the latest news about the portages on our further journey; how far they had been blocked with fallen trees, and whether the water was high or low in the rivers—­just as a visitor at home would talk about the effect of the strikes on the stock market, and the prospects of the newest organization of the non-voting classes for the overthrow of Tammany Hall.  Every phase of civilisation or barbarism creates its own conversational currency.  The weather, like the old Spanish dollar, is the only coin that passes everywhere.

But our Indians did not carry much small change about them.  They were dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking their pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies in front of a tobacconist’s shop,) until the spirit moved them, and they vanished in their canoe down the dark lake.  Our own guides were very different.  They were as full of conversation as a spruce-tree is of gum.  When all shallower themes were exhausted they would discourse of bears and canoes and lumber and fish, forever.  After Damon and I had left the fire and rolled ourselves in the blankets in our own tent, we could hear the men going on and on with their simple jests and endless tales of adventure, until sleep drowned their voices.

It was the sound of a French chanson that woke us early on the morning of our departure from the Lake of the Bear.  A gang of lumbermen were bringing a lot of logs through the lake.  Half-hidden in the cold gray mist that usually betokens a fine day, and wet to the waist from splashing about after their unwieldy flock, these rough fellows were singing at their work as cheerfully as a party of robins in a cherry-tree at sunrise.  It was like the miller and the two girls whom Wordsworth saw dancing in their boats on the Thames: