Moose Lake, August 16.

MY DEAR CHARLEY,—I've had at last the experience of a real Indian canoe voyage, of which we used to dream when we read The Young Voyageurs on the sly behind our desk at school. To begin at the beginning (which modern stories seldom do), imagine me starting from Bear Creek to descend the river in a canoe with two "real live Indians." If you want to know what Indians are like, just fancy two overfried sausages wrapped in dirty brown paper, and you'll have a perfect picture of my "noble red men," whose names sounded to me exactly like "Cock-a-doodle-doo" and "Very-like-a-whale." But you soon get used to such things in a country where names like Nomjamsquilligook and Kashagawigamog are quite every-day matters.

Now, Charley, if you value my blessing and your own welfare, never get into an Indian canoe. I ought to know something of uncomfortable conveyances, having crossed Central Asia with camels, gone a hundred miles into the Sahara in an Arab wagon, drifted over the Volga on a block of ice, and shot an Icelandic torrent in a leaky boat. But all these fall far, far short of the glorious uncomfortableness of my canoe. Louis XI. would have given any money for such an invention when he wanted to torture Cardinal Balue. I sat, and forthwith fell down on my back; I knelt, and promptly fell forward on my nose. I even tried to squat cross-legged, forgetting that Achmet Bey had spent three days in vainly showing me how not to do it when I was with him in Arabia; and how I did finally manage to stow myself I haven't found out yet. If the Indians had scolded or laughed at my mishaps, or even noticed them at all, it would not have been so bad, but their calm, silent, statuesque disapproval of everything I did made me feel as small as the first boy who breaks down at a spelling bee.

My first night was a very queer experience. Beyond the circle of light cast by our camp fire the great black shadow of the forest looked blacker and vaster than ever, and in its gloomy depths no sound was heard but the ghostly rustle of the leaves, which seemed to be whispering to each other some horrible secret. Then up rose the cold moon, glinting spectrally through the trees upon the swirling foam, and giving strange and goblin shapes to the huge trunks all around. In that dreary silence the hoarse sough of the river sounded unnaturally loud, and the wild faces of the Indians, seen and gone again by turns as the fire-glow waxed and waned, looked quite unearthly. But the mosquitoes soon gave me something else to think about, I can promise you.

For the next two days I enjoyed camp life in all its fullness—a buffalo-robe for bedding, a jackknife for dinner service, a camp fire for kitchen range, a freshly caught fish for breakfast, a water-fall for shower-bath. The very sense of existence seemed a pleasure in that glorious atmosphere, which made one feel always hungry, but never tired; and to jump into a swollen river, clothes and all, to carry the canoe a mile or more over broken ground, to start splitting wood at night-fall after voyaging all day, to get out on a wet rock at midnight and begin fishing, came quite natural. Once or twice I felt as if I must really give vent to my superfluous vitality by shouting or singing at the top of my voice, and was only deterred from striking up "I paddle my own canoe" by the reflection that I hadn't paddled it a foot since we started.

On the second day we passed several water-falls, and it was a rare sight to see the floating trees plunge over them. Sometimes a big trunk would stop short on the very brink, as if shrinking back, and then it would give a kind of leap forward, and over it would go—a regular suicide in dumb-show. A little below one of the falls the floating timber had drifted together into such a mass that it fairly blocked the channel, forming a barricade several hundred feet broad, and we had to get out and drag the canoe bodily over it as best we might. If you've ever walked over an acre of harrows piled on an acre of trucks, you'll know what kind of footing we had, and it's a marvel to me that I've got a leg left to stand on.

A little farther I espied a great shaggy beast, not unlike a bear, coming out of the river with a big fish in his mouth. I fired at him, but the bullet probably hit him too obliquely to pierce his thick hide. That's my theory at least; the Indians were mean enough to suggest that I never hit him at all.

On the third morning we came to a huge beaver dam, bigger than any I'd seen in Canada, and as neatly put together as any dike in Holland. The fur-coated gentlemen were hard at work when we appeared, some gnawing at the trees, while others plastered the dam with mud, using their broad tails for trowels. But at our coming they all went splash, splash into the water, which was all alive for a moment with dancing ripples and flapping tails—a regular fac-simile of that scene in The Last of the Mohicans over which we used to laugh so.

Of course we had to make another "portage" with the canoe; and while we were dragging it along, up jumped a barefooted boy from among the bushes, and lent us a hand with it. A splendid young savage he was, who would have quite delighted my old friend Tom Hughes of Rugby. Straight as a pine, keen-eyed as an eagle, so supple and sinewy that one might almost have rolled him up and pocketed him like a ball of twine. He told me he was "after beaver," and had done pretty well this season, trapping and what not. I gave him some tobacco, which seemed to please him mightily, and he repaid me with what my New York friends would call "a tall yarn":

"Time when beaver hats was all the go (which don't I just wish they was now!) a feller went for a swim in a river one day, leavin' his hat and things on the bank. It happened to be pretty close to a beaver dam; and when he cum out agin, fust thing he seed was two young beavers a-weepin' over his hat, 'cause they knowed it for the skin o' their father."

Toward four that afternoon we began to hear a dull booming roar far away ahead. You should have seen the Indians' eyes flash when they heard it! They knew the sound of the rapids well enough. All at once the sloping banks seemed to grow high and steep, and the overhanging pines to go far away up into the air, and the channel to get dark and narrow, and the stream to go rushing along like a mill-race. Then suddenly we swung around a huge black rock, and were fairly in the thick of it.

After that I have only a confused recollection of being tossed and banged about in a whirl of boiling foam, and clinging like grim death to the sides of the canoe, while the river itself seemed somehow to be standing stock-still, and the great cliffs on each side to be flying past like an express train. The whole air was filled with a hoarse grinding roar that seemed to shake the very sky, and the spray came lashing into my face till I was glad to shut my eyes.

When I opened them again I almost thought I was dreaming. Instead of the foaming river and the frowning precipices, we were floating on a broad smooth lake, with a little toy town pasted on the green slope above us, and half a dozen big fellows in red shirts running down to welcome us in.

But I must break off, for I'm so sleepy, after hauling timber all day, that I can hardly sit upright. Remember me kindly to all your folks, and believe me

Yours to death (or till my next railway journey, which is much the same nowadays),

D. Ker.