. Every phase of civilisation or
barbarism creates its own conversational currency. The weather, like the
old Spanish dollar, is the only coin that passes everywhere.

But our Indians did not carry much small change about them. They were
dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking their
pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies in front of
a tobacconist's shop,) until the spirit moved them, and they vanished in
their canoe down the dark lake. Our own guides were very different.
They were as full of conversation as a spruce-tree is of gum. When all
shallower themes were exhausted they would discourse of bears and canoes
and lumber and fish, forever. After Damon and I had left the fire and
rolled ourselves in the blankets in our own tent, we could hear the men
going on and on with their simple jests and endless tales of adventure,
until sleep drowned their voices.

It was the sound of a French chanson that woke us early on the morning
of our departure from the Lake of the Bear. A gang of lumbermen were
bringing a lot of logs through the lake. Half-hidden in the cold
gray mist that usually betokens a fine day, and wet to the waist from
splashing about after their unwieldy flock, these rough fellows
were singing at their work as cheerfully as a party of robins in a
cherry-tree at sunrise. It was like the miller and the two girls whom
Wordsworth saw dancing in their boats on the Thames:

"They dance not for me,
Yet mine is their glee!
Thus pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;
Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,
Moves all nature to gladness and mirth."

But our later thoughts of the lumbermen were not altogether grateful,
when we arrived that day, after a mile of portage, at the little Riviere
Blanche, upon which we had counted to float us down to Lac Tchitagama,
and found that they had stolen all its water to float their logs down
the Lake of the Bear. The poor little river was as dry as a theological
novel. There was nothing left of it except the bed and the bones; it
was like a Connecticut stream in the middle of August. All its pretty
secrets were laid bare; all its music was hushed. The pools that
lingered among the rocks seemed like big tears; and the voice of the
forlorn rivulets that trickled in here and there, seeking the parent
stre