ON AND ABOUT WATER 163

We therefore leave our canoe, and onward for St. Mary’s
Lake! We have not eaten since day before yesterday: all
the greater reason for hastening to where we know that we
will be welcomed and hospitably entertained. We camp
on the outlet of a little lake, which I call Murray, in honour
of the Hudson’s Bay Company's bourgeois at Stuart Lake.

September 24: Having crossed the lake, we walk on and
on, with our packs which hunger renders still more heavy.
At last we come in sight of the village, where we are received
with enthusiasm and regarded as heroes. (V. illustr. p. 184.)

So much for Father Morice’s journal. We may add
on our own account that the reader should not wonder
too much at the lionizing of the party by the good folk
of St. Mary’s Lake. They could not understand how
the explorers could have escaped with their lives from
the wrath of the terrible inhabitants of, for instance,
Dawson Lake: Gigantic monsters, so they said, big as
islands, with young ones the size of Hudson Bay Com-
pany barges, which are the real cause of the extra-
ordinary perturbations in its waters, whenever any
stranger is bold enough to venture upon them.

Again, along the steep banks of Morice Lake, did
not the travellers remark the tracks of the colossal
snakes, whose scales are like large beaver skins, which
haunt those remote quarters?

The clergyman missed those terrible animals
(‘probably because he was a priest,’’ explained the
natives), but he vividly remembers the unwelcome
effects of a strong wind made to whirl about by the par-
ticular conformation and orientation of the mountains
which border it.

Strange as it may seem, though he could not swim
a yard, Father Morice never felt uneasy on lake or
river. He had been sailing on Babine Lake with a side
wind which, at times, would threaten to overturn his
craft. Heand his crew watched for the squall to come,