eble shout, but
he failed to hear the reply. The canoe happened to float between him
and the boat, so that he could not see it as it passed slowly on its
course.

Poor Winklemann! In searching wildly about the wide expanse of water
for his lost mother, he had run his canoe violently against the top rail
of a fence. The delicate birch bark was ripped off. In another minute
it sank and turned bottom up. It was a canoe of the smallest size,
Winklemann having preferred to continue his search alone rather than
with an unwilling companion. The German was a good swimmer; a mere
upset might not have been serious. He could have righted the canoe, and
perhaps clambered into it over the stern, and baled it out. But with a
large hole in its bottom there was no hope of deliverance except in a
passing boat or canoe. Clinging to the frail craft, the poor youth
gazed long and anxiously round the horizon, endeavouring the while to
push the wreck towards the nearest tree-top, which, however, was a long
way off.

By degrees the cold told on his huge frame, and his great strength began
to fail. Once, a canoe appeared in the distance. He shouted with all
his might, but it was too far off. As it passed on out of sight he
raised his eyes as if in prayer, but no sound escaped his compressed
lips. It was noon when the accident occurred. Towards evening he felt
as though his consciousness were going to forsake him, but the love of
life was strong; he tightened his grasp on the canoe. It was just then
that he heard the voices of Ravenshaw's party and shouted, but the cry,
as we have said, was very feeble, and the poor fellow's sense of hearing
was dulled with cold and exhaustion, else he would have heard Lambert's
reply.

"Oh! mine moder! mine moder!" he sighed, as his head drooped helplessly
forward, though his fingers tightened on the canoe with the convulsive
grasp of a drowning man.

Night descended on the water. The moon threw a fitful gleam now and
then through a rift in the sailing clouds. All was still and dark and
desolate above and around the perishing man. Nothing with life was
visible save a huge raven which wheeled to and fro with a solemn croak
and almost noiseless wing.

But the case of Winklemann was not yet hopeless. His chum, Louis
Lambert, could not shake himself free from a suspicion that the cry,
which had been put down to imagination, might after all have been that
of some perishing human being--per