At half-past seven the next morning we were on our way to the Sault Ste. Marie, in the little steamer General Scott. The wind was blowing fresh, and a score of persons who had intended to visit the Sault were withheld by the fear of seasickness, so that half a dozen of us had the steamer to ourselves. In three or four hours we found ourselves gliding out of the lake, through smooth water, between two low points of land covered with firs and pines into the west strait. We passed Drummond's Island, and then coasted St. Joseph's Island, on the woody shore of which I was shown a solitary house. There I was told lives a long-nosed Englishman, a half-pay officer, with two wives, sisters, each the mother of a numerous offspring. This English polygamist has been more successful in seeking solitude than in avoiding notoriety. The very loneliness of his habitation on the shore causes it to be remarked, and there is not a passenger who makes the voyage to the Sault, to whom his house is not pointed out, and his story related. It was hinted to me that he had a third wife in Toronto, but I have my private doubts of this part of the story, and suspect that it was thrown in to increase my wonder. Beyond the island of St. Joseph we passed several islets of rock with fir-trees growing from the clefts. Here, in summer, I was told, the Indians often set up their wigwams, and subsist by fishing. There were none in sight as we passed, but we frequently saw on either shore the skeletons of the Chippewa habitations. These consist, not like those of the Potawottamies, of a circle of sticks placed in the form of a cone, but of slender poles bent into circles, so as to make an almost regular hemisphere, over which, while it serves as a dwelling, birch-bark and mats of bulrushes are thrown. On the western side of the passage, opposite to St. Joseph's Island, stretches the long coast of Sugar Island, luxuriant with an extensive forest of the sugar-maple. Here the Indians manufacture maple-sugar in the spring. I inquired concerning their agriculture. "They plant no corn nor squashes," said a passenger, who had resided for some time at the Sault; "they will not ripen in this climate; but they plant potatoes in the sugar-bush, and dig them when the spring opens. They have no other agriculture; they plant no beans as I believe the Indians do elsewhere."