velins, surrendered to the ugliest
old septuagenarian in the village, and sent her heart away rejoicing in
the ownership of a policeman's whistle courted by her leering eyes and
already smirched by her dirty lips, together with a stock of tea,
crackers and bacon for which her expanded corporosity evinced no
imminent need. At last rid of our importunate acquaintances, we turned
in for a sleep, which we resolved should be broken at the first moment,
dark or light, when we might cross the lake. Before daylight the
Betsy's resonant call awoke us, and in the earliest gray we paddled out
upon a heavy but not foaming sea, and after two and a half hours of
monotonous splashing in the trough of the waves landed for breakfast on
the eastern shore, whence we crossed a lovely bay and passed out once
more upon the river.

A mile on our way we came to the prettiest of the many Indian
burying-grounds which we saw now and then. Formerly, the Indians
deposited their dead upon rude scaffolds well up in the air. Now they
seek high ground and place the bodies of the departed in shallow
graves, over which they build little wooden houses a foot or two high
with gabled roofs, and mark each with a white flag raised upon a pole a
few feet above the sleeper's head. In this neighborhood we inquired of
a stalwart brave concerning our proximity to a portage by means of
which a short walk over to a small lake near the head of Ball Club Lake
and a pull of six miles down the latter would bring us out again into
the river, and save a tedious voyage of twenty-five to thirty miles
through a broad savanna. The Indian in his old birch canoe joined our
fleet, and led us to the beginning of the portage near the foot of
Little Winnipeg Lake. We had carried two canoes and all the baggage
over to the water on the other side of a sandy ridge, leaving only the
Kleiner Fritz to be brought, when our guide and packer, with a
preliminary grunt, said "Money?" inquiring how much we intended to pay
him. He had worked hard for four hours, for which we tried to tell him
that we should pay him one dollar when he should bring over the
remaining canoe; but we could not make him understand what a dollar
was. We then laid down, one after another, four silver quarter-dollars
and two bars of tobacco; whereupon he gave a satisfied grunt and an
affirmative nod, disappeared in the forest, and in less than an hour
returned with the Fritz upon his steaming shoulders, having covered