By the bye, the man who gave them this name must have had a hide tanned to the toughness of a leather boot, or he certainly never would have omitted to commemorate the plague of the mosquitoes which infest it. Of all sections of the country populated with this delightful insect, that I have ever crossed, this is decidedly the worst. So much so, that I believe it must have been that part of it, in which the man we have heard of, took refuge from these winged atrocities under an old steam-boiler, amusing himself while in his fancied security by clamping their murderous beaks, with an old hammer he chanced to have with him, to the iron shell through which they were penetrating. The result of this style of proceeding was perfectly unforeseen by him. In some hour and a half, the muscle of the trapped mosquitoes was sufficiently strong for them to raise the iron shell and fly off with it. Be this as it may, it is a complete purgatory. You, in vain, try to smash one mosquito whose fangs you feel in your forehead. While doing so, another fastens on your nose, and half a dozen more upon either cheek. The amount of profanity they caused on the tongue of myself and my companion, I even now look back upon, with considerable contrition. The whole of this portion of the country, as far as Black River, was under Mosquito dominion; and when we quitted it, it was with the sincere hope, upon my part, that nothing might oblige me to revisit it. When we once more met the balance of our party at Stevens Point, which had been as unsuccessful as ourselves in tracking out the game, it is now a question to me how our swollen and disfigured faces could be at all recognizable. After some consultation, it was decided that portion of the party should strike for the Little Eauclaire River, while another should go up the larger stream called the Big Eauclaire. Myself and companion remained for a few days at this place, and finding nothing determinate, dressed ourselves as raftsmen,--in red shirts and overalls, making up our minds to separate. Then, I hired myself out to run the Caughnaut Rapids, on a trip to Plover Portage. It was on our way in return, when "gigging back," as the raftsmen term it, that I first caught a glimpse of success. One of the pilots, had to employ a term well used in the west and south of the States, "cottoned" to me. This was probably on account of my youth and apparent verdancy, as well as my muscle. I was just the sort of fellow he evidently supposed could be employed as a green hand in his illegal calling. We had been talking of the ways of living in the West one morning, when he said: "Look here, young fellow, thar's many a way of making enough to live, that's easier than your'n is." "How is that?" "D'yer see this?" At the same time he pulled out of his pocket a lot of "queer," or counterfeit bills. He must have had more than two hundred dollars of bogus money of different denominations--fives, threes, and twos--with him.