On the 25th, having only a little pemican left, which we wished to keep, we sent forward a hunter in the little elk-skin canoe, to kill some game.  About ten o’clock, we found him waiting for us with two moose that he had killed.  He had suspended the hearts from the branch of a tree as a signal.  We landed some men to help him in cutting up and shipping the game.  We continued to glide safely down.  But toward two o’clock, P.M., after doubling a point, we got into a considerable rapid, where, by the maladroitness of those who managed the double pirogue in which I was, we met with a melancholy accident.  I had proposed to go ashore, in order to lighten the canoes, which were loaded to the water’s edge; but the steersman insisted that we could go down safe, while the bow-man was turning the head of the pirogue toward the beach; by this manoeuvre we were brought athwart the stream, which was carrying us fast toward the falls; just then our frail bark struck upon a sunken rock; the lower canoe broke amid-ships and filled instantly, and the upper one being lighted, rolled over, precipitating us all into the water.  Two of our men, Olivier Roy Lapensee and Andre Belanger, were drowned; and it was not without extreme difficulty that we succeeded in saving Messrs. Pillet and Wallace, as well as a man named J.  Hurteau.  The latter was so far gone that we were obliged to have recourse to the usual means for the resuscitation of drowned persons.  The men lost all their effects; the others recovered but a part of theirs; and all our provisions went.  Toward evening, in ascending the river (for I had gone about two miles below, to recover the effects floating down), we found the body of Lapensee.  We interred it as decently as we could, and planted at his grave a cross, on which I inscribed with the point of my knife, his name and the manner and date of his death.  Belanger’s body was not found.  If anything could console the shades of the departed for a premature and unfortunate end, it would be, no doubt, that the funeral rites have been paid to their remains, and that they themselves have given their names to the places where they perished:  it is thus that the shade of Palinurus rejoiced in the regions below, at learning from the mouth of the Sibyl, that the promontory near which he was drowned would henceforth be called by his name:  gaudet cognomine terra.  The rapid and the point of land where the accident I have described took place, will bear, and bears already, probably, the name of Lapensee.[AG]

[Footnote AG:  Mr. Franchere, not having the fear of the Abbe Gaume before his eyes, so wrote in his Journal of 1814; finding consolation in a thought savoring, we confess, more of Virgil than of the catechism.  It is a classic term that calls to our mind rough Captain Thorn’s sailor-like contempt for his literary passengers so comically described by Mr. Irving.  Half of the humor as well as of the real interest of Mr. Franchere’s charming narrative, is lost by one who has never read “Astoria.”]