corner," said Jean; "didn't you
know where it was?"

"Yes, after I touched it," cried Ferdinand; "but you took in a bucket of
water, and I suppose your m'sieu' is sitting on a piece of the river. Is
it not?"

This seemed to us all a very merry jest, and we laughed with the same
inextinguishable laughter which a practical joke, according to Homer,
always used to raise in Olympus. It is one of the charms of life in the
woods that it brings back the high spirits of boyhood and renews
the youth of the world. Plain fun, like plain food, tastes good
out-of-doors. Nectar is the sweet sap of a maple-tree. Ambrosia is only
another name for well-turned flapjacks. And all the immortals, sitting
around the table of golden cedar-slabs, make merry when the clumsy
Hephaistos, playing the part of Hebe, stumbles over a root and upsets
the plate of cakes into the fire.

The first little rapid of the Grande Decharge was only the beginning.
Half a mile below we could see the river disappear between two points
of rock. There was a roar of conflict, and a golden mist hanging in the
air, like the smoke of battle. All along the place where the river sank
from sight, dazzling heads of foam were flashing up and falling back, as
if a horde of water-sprites were vainly trying to fight their way up to
the lake. It was the top of the grande chute, a wild succession of falls
and pools where no boat could live for a moment. We ran down toward it
as far as the water served, and then turned off among the rocks on the
left hand, to take the portage.

These portages are among the troublesome delights of a journey in the
wilderness. To the guides they mean hard work, for everything, including
the boats, must be carried on their backs. The march of the canoes on
dry land is a curious sight. Andrew Marvell described it two hundred
years ago when he was poetizing beside the little river Wharfe in
Yorkshire:--

"And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist,
And like antipodes in shoes
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but none so slow,
These rational amphibii go!"

But the sportsman carries nothing, except perhaps his gun, or his
rod, or his photographic camera; and so for him the portage is only
a pleasant opportunity to stretch his legs, cramped by sitting in the
canoe, and to renew his acquaintance with the pretty things that are in
the woods.

We sauntered along the t