r
the water until the Indian village and its still firing braves were
hidden behind a river bend. Through many marsh-lined channels, and
amidst a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks
the water of Lake Winnipeg. A mixture of land and water, of mud, and of
the varied vegetation which grows thereon, this delta of the Red River
is, like other spots of a similar description, inexplicably lonely.

The wind sighs over it, bending the tall weeds with mournful rustle, and
the wild bird passes and repasses with plaintive cry over the rushes
which form his summer home.

Emerging from the sedges of the Red River, we shot out into the waters
of an immense lake,--a lake which stretched away into unseen spaces, and
over whose waters the fervid July sun was playing strange freaks of
mirage and inverted shore-land.

This was Lake Winnipeg,--a great lake, even on a continent where lakes
are inland seas. But vast as it is now, it is only a tithe of what it
must have been in the earlier ages of the earth.

The capes and headlands of what once was a vast inland sea now stand far
away from the shores of Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles from its present
limits these great landmarks still look down on the ocean, but it is an
ocean of grass. The waters of Winnipeg have retired from their feet, and
they are now mountain-ridges, rising over seas of verdure. At the bottom
of this by-gone lake lay the whole valley of the Red River, the present
Lakes Winnepegoos and Manitoba, and the prairie islands of the Lower
Assiniboine,--one hundred thousand square miles of water. The water
has long since been drained off by the lowering of the rocky channels
leading to Hudson Bay, and the bed of the extinct lake now forms the
richest prairie-land in the world.

But although Winnipeg has shrunken to a tenth of its original size, its
rivers still remain worthy of the great basin into which they once
flowed. The Saskatchewan is longer than the Danube, the Winnipeg has
twice the volume of the Rhine. Four hundred thousand square miles of
continent shed their waters into Lake Winnipeg; a lake as changeful as
the ocean, but, fortunately for us, in its very calmest mood to-day.
Not a wave, not a ripple on its surface, not a breath of breeze to
aid the untiring paddles. The little canoe, weighed down by men and
provisions, had scarcely three inches of its gunwale over the water, and
yet the steersman held his course far out into the glassy was