At last they reached the delta of the river, and it was well that they were so near their destination, for the Indians were thoroughly demoralised and the _voyageurs_ dispirited, provisions were running perilously low, and the short northern summer was rapidly drawing to its close. On July 12th the party emerged from the river into what seemed to Mackenzie to be a lake, but which was really the mouth of the river. The following day confirmation of this came with the rising tide, which very nearly carried off the men’s baggage while they slept. Paddling over to an island, which he named Whale Island, to commemorate an exciting chase after a school of these enormous animals the previous day, Mackenzie erected a post, on which he engraved the latitude of the spot, his own name, the number of persons he had with him in the expedition, and the time spent on the island. After a fruitless attempt to get in touch with the Eskimo, Mackenzie turned his face to the south, and, after a comparatively uneventful journey, arrived at Fort Chipewyan on September 12th, after a voyage of one hundred and two days. He had explored one of the greatest rivers of America, from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic, and he had added to the known world a territory greater than Europe. Nor was this all, for Mackenzie’s journey to the Arctic was but the introduction to his even more difficult, and more momentous, expedition of three years later, over the mountains to the shores of the Pacific. This, however, does not lie within the compass of the present sketch. BOYLE, SON AND WATCHURST PRINTERS, 3-5 WARWICK SQUARE, E.C.