“We trembled and quaked, for all boats not stoutly armed, steal by them in the dead of night. We muffled our paddles, and instantly dropped under some willows, where we listened to the yelping, barking rabble, until sable night had drawn her curtain around (though it was not _sable_, for the moon arose, to our great mortification and alarm, in full splendour and brightness), when, at eleven o’clock, we put out to the middle of the stream—silenced our paddles, and trusted to the current to waft us by them. We lay close in our boat with a pile of green bushes over us, making us nothing in the world but a ‘floating tree-top.’ On the bank, in front of the village, was enacting at that moment, a scene of the most frightful and thrilling nature. An hundred torches were swung about in all directions, giving us a full view of the group that were assembled, and some fresh scalps were hung on poles, and were then going through the nightly ceremony that is performed about them for a certain number of nights, composed of the frightful and appalling shrieks, and yells, and gesticulations of the _scalp-dance_.[31] “In addition to this multitude of demons (as they looked), there were some hundreds of cackling women and girls bathing in the river on the edge of a sand-bar, at the lower end of the village; at which place the stream drifted our small craft in, close to the shore, till the moon lit their shoulders, their foreheads, chins, noses! and they stood, half-merged, like mermaids, and gazed upon us! singing ‘_Chee-na-see-nun, chee-na-see-nun ke-mon-shoo kee-ne-he-na, ha-way-tah? shee-sha, shee-sha_;’ ‘How do you do, how do you do? where are you going, old tree? Come here, come here.’ ‘_Lah-kee-hoon! lali kee-hoon! natoh, catogh!_’ (‘A canoe, a canoe! see the paddle!!’) In a moment the songs were stopped! the lights were out—the village in an instant was in darkness, and dogs were muzzled! and nimbly did our paddles ply the water, till spy-glass told us at morning’s dawn, that the bank and boundless prairies of grass and green that were all around us, were free from following footsteps of friend or foe. A sleepless night had passed, and lightly tripped our bark, and swift, over the swimming tide during _that_ day; which was one, not of pleasure, but of trembling excitement; while our eyes were continually scanning the distant scenes that were behind us, and our muscles throwing us forward with tireless energy. * * * * * * * * * Night came upon us again, and we landed at the foot of a towering bluff, where the musquitoes met us with ten thousand kicks and cuffs, and importunities, until we were choked and strangled into almost irrevocable despair and madness.[32] “A ‘_snaggy bend_’ announced its vicinity just below us by its roaring; and hovering night told us, that we could not with safety ‘undertake it.’