I sat still and worked patiently, however, content with the little gain; and at last reached the opposite shore about three miles below the place of my embarkation; having passed close by several huge snags, which I was lucky enough to escape, without the power of having cleared them except by kind accident. “My craft was ‘unseaworthy’ when I started, and when I had got to the middle of the river, owing to the rotten wood, with which a great part of it was made, and which had now become saturated with water, it had sunk entirely under the surface, letting me down nearly to the waist, in the water. In this critical way I moved slowly along, keeping the sticks together under me; and at last, when I reached the shore, some of the long and awkward limbs projecting from my raft, having reached it before me, and being suddenly resisted by the bank, gave the instant signal for its dissolution, and my sudden debarkation, when I gave one grand leap in the _direction_ of the bank, yet some yards short of it, and into the water, from head to foot; but soon crawled out, and wended my way a mile or two up the shore, where I found my canoe snugly and safely moored in the willows, where I stepped into it, and paddled back to the island, and to the same spot where my misfortunes commenced, to enjoy the pleasure of exultations, which were to flow from contrasting my present with my former situation. “Thus, the Island of Mas-co-tin soon lost its horrors, and I strolled two days and encamped two nights upon its silent shores—with prairie hens and wild fowl in abundance for my meals. From this lovely ground, which shews the peaceful graves of hundreds of red men, who have valued it before me, I paddled off in my light bark, and said, as I looked back, ‘Sleep there in peace, ye brave fellows! until the sacrilegious hands of white man, and the unsympathizing ploughshare shall turn thy bones from their quiet and beautiful resting-place!’ “Two or three days of strolling, brought me again to the Camp Des Moines, and from thence, with my favourite little bark canoe, placed upon the deck of the steamer, I embarked for St. Louis, where I arrived in good order, and soon found the way to the comfortable quarters from whence I am now writing.” When I finished telling this story to Joe, his portrait was done, and I rejoiced to find that I had given to it all the fire and all the _game look_ that had become so familiar and pleasing to me in our numerous rambles in the far distant wilds of our former campaigns.[21]