and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.

The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,--soft,
yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
strange page of history in stone.

Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
see is largely second growth,--Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
branches seem to float in air.

Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:--

"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate."

We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.

Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
water, and have left us far behind,--swans, the Canada goose, great
flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
the duck tribe,--spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word "goose" as synonym for
stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
she may exclaim with th