"Excuse me," replied Claud, "excuse me if I say, Miss Fluella, as Mr. Phillips calls you, that you have already expressed, and in the finest terms, far more than I am entitled to; so let that pass, and tell us how your mishap occurred?" "O, naturally enough, though rather stupidly," responded the other, regaining her ease and usually animated manner. "You must know that I sometimes play the Indian girl, in doing my father's trouting. And, having rowed down to the rapids this morning for that purpose, I ran my canoe on to a rock, up here at the head of the falls, and threw into an eddy below, till I had taken a supply. But, like other folks, I must have the _one more_,--a large one I had seen playing round my hook; and, in my eagerness to take him, I did not notice that my canoe had slipped off the rock till I found it drifting down the current. I seized my oar, but, with the first blow in the water it snapt in my hands. You know the rest, unless, perhaps, the number of fish I caught," she added, pointing to a string of fine trout still lying safely in the bottom of her canoe. "Brave girl!" exclaimed the hunter, going up to the boat with Claud, to inspect the fish, which they had not before noticed. "A good ten pounds, and fine ones, too. Claud shall remain here while I go a piece up the lake for a deer, and follow your example, except the race down the rapids; but that he can't do, for I shall take our canoe with me, and make him fish from the shore, which will be just as well. Are you agreed to that arrangement, young man?" This proposition being accepted, and it being also settled by common consent that no further attempt should, at this time, be made to ascend the remaining rapids with either of the boats the hunter and Claud, accompanied by the light-footed Fluella, took up her canoe and set off with it, along shore, towards a convenient landing in the lake above, then not more than sixty or seventy rods distant. In a short time the proposed landing was reached, and the boat let down into the water. The maiden, with an easy and sprightly movement, then flung herself into her seat, and, with a paddle hastily whittled for her out of a piece of drift-wood, by the ever ready hunter, sent her little craft in a curving sweep into the lake; when, facing round to her preservers, while a sweet and grateful smile broke over her dimpling features, she bade and bowed them adieu, and went bounding over the undulating waves towards her home, on an island some miles distant, near the southeastern border of this romantic sheet of water. "Can it be," half-soliloquized Claud, as he stood rivetting his wondering gaze on the beauteous figure, which, gracefully bowing with the lightly-dipping oar, was receding from his rapt view, and gradually melting away in the distance; "can it be that she is but a mere Indian girl, one of those wild, untutored children of the forest?"