diversified its surface, that the scene at once soothed the anxious mind of the peasant maid and inspired her with fresh energy. “Time is passing like that mighty stream,” she thought, “and before another sunset help for Morton may be too late,” and then she asked herself why she, so used to the management of a canoe, should not paddle herself across? She sought out madam and told her what she proposed, was met with energetic protestation, and then was allowed to have her own way. Fortified with directions which she only partially understood, Maggie took her place in the canoe, and waving good-bye to madam and her troop of children, who stood on the landing, pushed out. Unmindful of how the light skiff drifted downwards, she kept its head pointed to the island that lay opposite to her and paddled for dear life. Once she received a shower of spray in passing too near to where the current chafed and fumed over a sunken rock, but she retained her presence of mind, and was glad to see the island draw nearer with each stroke. Just as the gravelly strand seemed within reach, the drift brought her nigh to the end of the island, and she paddled into the channel that lay between it and the islets adjoining, which nestled so closely that the tops of the trees upon them interlaced, furnishing a leafy arcade to the narrow channels that divided them. As Maggie paused for breath after her severe exertion, a sense of the quiet beauty and security of the retreat came over her, and drawing the canoe on to the pebbly beach, she laved her feet while, idly picking from the bushes and vines within reach, she formed a bouquet of colored leaves. She heard the roar of the rapids beneath and she knew that a few yards farther on lay the deep-flowing north channel, but her nature was not one to borrow trouble and she enjoyed the present to the full in her cool retreat. When she again took her place in the canoe, a few dips of the paddle took it outside the islands, and she saw the main channel of the river--smooth except for great greasy circles of slowly whirling water, as if the mighty river, after its late experience of being shredded in the rapids above, had a nightmare of foreboding of a repetition of the same agony in the rapids to which it was hastening. With steady stroke Maggie urged the canoe forward and did not allow the consciousness that she was drifting toward the rapids discompose her. As the canoe neared the bank, the sweep of the current increased, and her arms began to ache with the violent and long-continued exertion. To her joy, she saw a man standing at the landing and the strokes of her paddle quickened. The canoe was swept past the landing, when the man, picking up a coil of rope, ran downwards to a point, and watching his chance, threw it across the canoe. Maggie caught an end of the rope, and in a minute was hauled ashore. The man, a French Canadian employed to assist the bateaux in passing between lakes St Francis and