ee a canoe made from
three trees! Is it a raft you mean, Cousin Norman?"

"No," responded the other; "a canoe, and one that will serve us for the
rest of our voyage."

All three--Basil, Lucien, and Francois--looked to their cousin for an
explanation.

"You would rather not go back up the river?" he inquired, glancing from
one to the other.

"We wish to go on--all of us," answered Basil, speaking for his brothers
as well.

"Very well," assented the young fur-trader; "I think it is better as you
wish it. Out of these trees I can build a boat that will carry us. It
will take us some days to do it, and some time to find the timber, but I
am tolerably certain it is to be found in these woods. To do the job
properly I want three kinds; two of them I can see from where I sit; the
third I expect will be got in the hills we saw this morning."

As Norman spoke he pointed to two trees that grew among many others not
far from the spot. These trees were of very different kinds, as was
easily told by their leaves and bark. The nearer and more conspicuous of
them at once excited the curiosity of the three Southerners. Lucien
recognised it from its botanical description. Even Basil and Francois,
though they had never seen it, as it is not to be found in the hot clime
of Louisiana, knew it from the accounts given of it by travellers. The
tree was the celebrated "canoe-birch," or as Lucien named it,
"paper-birch," celebrated as the tree out of whose bark those beautiful
canoes are made that carry thousands of Indians over the interior lakes
and rivers of North America; out of whose bark whole tribes of these
people fashion their bowls, their pails, and their baskets; with which
they cover their tents, and from which they even make their soup-kettles
and boiling-pots! This, then, was the canoe birch-tree, so much talked
of, and so valuable to the poor Indians who inhabit the cold regions
where it grows.

Our young Southerners contemplated the tree with feelings of interest
and curiosity. They saw that it was about sixty feet high, and somewhat
more than a foot in diameter. Its leaves were nearly cordate, or
heart-shaped, and of a very dark-green colour; but that which rendered
it most conspicuous among the other trees of the forest was the shining
white or silver-coloured bark that covered its trunk, and its numerous
slender branches. This bark is only white externally. When you have cut
through the epidermis you find it of a red