ward down the current of French River.

Days passed, and no sign of man enlivened the rocky desolation. Hunger
was pressing them hard, for the ten gluttonous Indians had devoured
already nearly all their provision for the voyage, and they were forced
to subsist on the blueberries and wild raspberries that grew abundantly
in the meagre soil, when suddenly they encountered a troop of three
hundred savages, whom, from their strange and startling mode of wearing
their hair, Champlain named the Cheveux Releves. "Not one of our
courtiers," he says, "takes so much pains in dressing his locks." Here,
however, their care of the toilet ended; for, though tattooed on various
parts of the body, painted, and armed with bows, arrows, and shields of
bison-hide, they wore no clothing whatever. Savage as was their aspect,
they were busied in the pacific task of gathering blueberries for their
winter store. Their demeanor was friendly; and from them the voyager
learned that the great lake of the Hurons was close at hand.

Now, far along the western sky was traced the watery line of that inland
ocean, and, first of white men except the Friar Le Caron, Champlain
beheld the "Mer Douce," the Fresh-Water Sea of the Hurons. Before him,
too far for sight, lay the spirit-haunted Manitonalins, and, southward,
spread the vast bosom of the Georgian Bay. For more than a hundred
miles, his course was along its eastern shores, among islets countless
as the sea-sands,--an archipelago of rocks worn for ages by the wash of
waves. He crossed Byng Inlet, Franklin Inlet, Parry Sound, and the wider
bay of Matchedash, and seems to have landed at the inlet now called
Thunder Bay, at the entrance of the Bay of Matchedash, and a little west
of the Harbor of Penetanguishine.

An Indian trail led inland, through woods and thickets, across broad
meadows, over brooks, and along the skirts of green acclivities. To the
eye of Champlain, accustomed to the desolation he had left behind,
it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. He reached at last a broad
opening in the forest, with fields of maize, pumpkins ripening in the
sun, patches of sunflowers, from the seeds of which the Indians
made hair-oil, and, in the midst, the Huron town of Otonacha. In all
essential points, it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years
before, had seen at Montreal,--the same triple palisade of crossed and
intersecting trunks, and the same long lodges of bark, each containing
several fami