transit from the edge of the canebrake, beheld their commander swept down
the stream, and vanishing, as it were, in an instant. All that day they
remained with their companions on the bank, lamenting in an abyss of
despair for the loss of their guardian angel, for so Douay calls La Salle.
[Footnote: "Ce fut une desolation extreme pour nous tous qui desesperions
de revoir jamais nostre Ange tutelaire, le Sieur de la Salle... Tout le
jour se passa en pleurs et en larmes."--Douay, in Le Clercq, ii. 315.] It
was fast growing dark, when, to their unspeakable relief, they saw him
advancing with his party along the opposite bank, having succeeded, after
great exertion, in guiding the raft to land. How to rejoin him was now the
question. Douay and his companions, who had tasted no food that day, broke
their fast on two young eagles which they knocked out of their nest, and
then spent the night in rueful consultation as to the means of crossing
the river. In the morning, they waded into the marsh, the friar with his
breviary in his hood, to keep it dry, and hacked among the caries till
they had gathered enough to make another raft, on which, profiting by La
Salle's experience, they safely crossed, and rejoined him.

Next, they became entangled in a cane-brake, where La Salle, as usual with
him in such cases, took the lead, a hatchet in each hand, and hewed out a
path for his followers. They soon reached the villages of the Cenis
Indians, on and near the River Trinity, a tribe then powerful, but long
since extinct. Nothing could surpass the friendliness of their welcome.
The chiefs came to meet them, bearing the calumet, and followed by
warriors in shirts of embroidered deer-skin. Then the whole village
swarmed out like bees, gathering around the visitors with offerings of
food, and all that was precious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged with
the great chief; but he compelled his men to encamp at a distance, lest
the ardor of their gallantry might give occasion of offence. The lodges of
the Cenis, forty or fifty feet high, and covered with a thatch of meadow-