painted porcelain, and tell herself how pretty they
were. She would choose a fragment of scarlet or purple glass, hold it
up to her pathetic, tear-stained face, and try to interest herself in
the coloured landscape that filed by. But it was no use. Even the
amber glass had lost its power to interest her. And at length,
exhausted by her terror and her loneliness, she sank down and fell
asleep.

It was late afternoon when Mandy Ann fell asleep, and her sleep was
the heavy semi-torpor coming after unrelieved grief and fear. It was
unjarred by the pitching of the fiercer rapids which the bateau
presently encountered. The last mile of the river's course before
joining the lake consisted of deep, smooth "dead-water"; but, a strong
wind from the north-west having sprung up toward the end of the day,
the bateau drove on with undiminished speed. On the edge of the
evening, when the sun was just sinking into the naked tops of the
rampikes along the western shore, the bateau swept out upon the
desolate reaches of Big Lonely, and in the clutch of the wind hastened
down mid-lake to seek the roaring chutes and shrieking vortices of the
"Devil's Trough."

* * * * *

Out in the middle of the lake, where the heavy wind had full sweep,
the pitching and thumping of the big waves terrified the poor little
woodchuck almost to madness; but they made no impression on the
wearied child, where she lay sobbing tremulously in her sleep. They
made a great impression, however, on a light birch canoe, which was
creeping up alongshore in the teeth of the wind, urged by two paddles.
The paddlers were a couple of lumbermen, returning from the mouth of
the river. All the spring and early summer they had been away from the
Settlement, working on "the drive" of the winter's logging, and now,
hungry for home, they were fighting their way doggedly against wind
and wave. There was hardly a decent camping-ground on all the
swamp-cursed shores of Big Lonely, except at the very head of the
lake, where the river came in, and this spot the voyagers were
determined to make before dark. They would then have clear poling
ahead of them next day, to get them home to the Settlement in time for
supper.

The man in the bow, a black-bearded, sturdy figure in a red shirt,
paddled with slow, unvarying strokes, dipping his big maple paddle
deep and bending his back to it, paying no heed whatever to the heavy
black waves which l