compelled to clear the flag lines entangled at the truck;
therefore a strong and active man, such as Wacousta is
described to have been, might very well have been supposed,
in his strong anxiety for revenge and escape with his
victim, to have doubled his strength and activity on so
important an occasion, rendering that easy of attainment
by himself which an ordinary and unexcited man might deem
impossible. I myself have knocked down a gate, almost
without feeling the resistance, in order to escape the
stilettos of assassins.

The second objection is to the narrowness attributed in
the tale to the river St. Clair. This was done in the
license usually accorded to a writer of fiction, in order
to give greater effect to the scene represented as having
occurred there, and, of course, in no way intended as a
geographical description of the river, nor was it necessary.
In the same spirit and for the same purpose it has been
continued.

It will be seen that at the termination of the tragedy
enacted at the bridge, by which the Bloody Run was in
those days crossed, that the wretched wife of the condemned
soldier pronounced a curse that could not, of course,
well be fulfilled in the course of the tale. Some few
years ago I published in Canada--I might as well have
done so in Kamschatka--the continuation, which was to
have been dedicated to the last King of England, but
which, after the death of that monarch, was inscribed to
Sir John Harvey, whose letter, as making honorable mention