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 C