our mosquito-bars beneath, then cooked and ate under the flare of our
camp-fire, and sought our canoe-beds for that sweet sleep which comes
of weariness of body, but not of mind, under the bright stars and
broad-faced moon shining with unwonted clearness in that clear air.

The night proved very cool. Our outer garments, wet from so much
leaping in and out of the canoes, and rolled up for storage on the
decks over night, were found in the early morning frozen stiff, and had
to be thawed before we could unroll them. The thermometer registered
33° after six o'clock, and frost lay upon all our surroundings.

For two and a half days our course was down a stream winding gracefully
through a broad region of savanna country, occasionally varied by the
crossing of low sandy ridges beautifully graved by lofty yellow pines.
In the savannas the shores are made of black soil drifted in, and
forming, with the dense mass of grass-roots, a tough compound in which
the earthy and vegetable parts are about equal, while the tall grass,
growing perpendicularly from the shore, makes a stretch of walls on
either side, the monotony of which becomes at last so tiresome that a
twenty-feet hill, a boulder as large as a bushel basket or a tree of
unusual size or kind becomes specially interesting. Standing on tiptoe
in the canoes, we could see nothing before or around us but a boundless
meadow, with here and there a clump of pines, and before and behind the
serpent-like creepings of the river. The only physical life to be seen
was in the countless ducks, chiefly of the teal and mallard varieties,
a few small birds and the fish--lake-trout, grass-bass, pickerel and
sturgeon--constantly darting under and around us or poised motionless
in water so clear that every fin and scale was seen at depths of six
and eight feet. The ducks were exceedingly wild--something not easily
accounted for in that untroubled and uninhabited country; but we were