by an old French Canadian, Jacques Morriseau, who travelled the whole distance on snow shoes. His food was sea biscuit and fat pork which he ate and enjoyed sitting on a snow bank, and would afterwards puff away dull care in clouds of smoke curling from his old clay pipe, the stem of which was just long enough to keep the burning punk with which he lit it about two inches from his nose. From Lachine to Cornwall, he was obliged to sleep out of doors three nights--the settlers were then so few and far between, he could not always reach a house--and the only bed he had on these occasions was of green boughs under him and a blanket to cover him. He always rested a night going either way under Captain Anderson's roof. In 1785, Captain Anderson was appointed a magistrate ... and drew half pay as a Captain until his death, which occurred in June, 1836 (born 1736), not from any bodily ailment, but accidentally falling, his hip joint was broken, and from his great age the bones would not unite. 20. THE DESCENT OF THE MACKENZIE RIVER (1789). =Source.=--Sir Alexander Mackenzie's _Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the years 1789 and 1793_. London, 1801. 5 July, 1789.... There were five families, consisting of twenty-five or thirty persons, and of two different tribes, the Slave and Dog-rib Indians. We made them smoke, though it was evident they did not know the use of tobacco; we likewise supplied them with grog; but I am disposed to think that they accepted our civilities rather from fear than inclination. We acquired a more effectual influence over them by the distribution of knives, beads, awls, rings, gartering, fire-steels, flints and hatchets; so that they became more familiar even than we expected, for we could not keep them out of our tents; though I did not observe that they attempted to purloin anything. The information which they gave respecting the river had so much of the fabulous that I shall not detail it: it will be sufficient just to mention their attempts to persuade us that it would require several winters to get to the sea, and that old age would come upon us before the period of our return: we were also to encounter monsters of such horrid shapes and destructive powers as could only exist in their wild imaginations. They added, besides, that there were two impassable falls in the river, the first of which was about thirty days march from us.