buckskin moccasin and cotton hose--through any protection at our command except a cotton canopy hung wide of our heads and bodies. Sung and stung out of all endurance by the very centre of that army of the wilderness, we were astir in the grayest of our second Thursday's dawn, and were soon in readiness for our final portage over the crests of the Heights of Land to the river, which out of our long and severe march had become to us a veritable Mecca. Our way was up a gentle range of hills, whose tops, but a few yards wide, divide the waters which flow southward to the great Gulf from those which seek their far northward trend through the Red River of the North. The first division of our party reached the Mississippi before noon with a joy born out of a week's toil and hardship, and in a trice I was drinking of and laving in its swift, bright water. We could hardly realize that in this deep, rushing brook, not more than four or five paces wide, we saw the beginnings of that majestic current which drains half a continent. Soon our second division came up, we ate our last lunch in company, and the Indians, each shaking us by the hand with a grunt and a smile, then going off into the forest with a cheer, left us alone in that vast and uninhabited wilderness. Late in the afternoon we launched our canoes into the little river, and loaded them for our journey to its head, camping about three miles above our point of embarkation. [Illustration: HEAD OF THE MISSISSIPPI.] The next morning we started with light hearts upon what we supposed would be but a short journey to the river's source, to meet an exasperating disappointment. We had made a bargain for transportation from the railway to Itasca Lake or to a point five miles below, all fully diagrammed and understood by correspondence, but found ourselves set down by the employes of the rascally half-breed--who had been careful to leave us at Wild Rice Lake--in an unknown land, six days from civilization, at a point nearly or quite thirty miles below the lake, below a region of rapids and obstructions against which we had especially stipulated, and up which no craft had ever travelled. A mile's work brought us to the beginning of this second series of troubles. Lying across the river at all heights, depths and angles were the tough pine logs we had dreaded, and at every mile or two were tumbling rapids. All that long Friday we took our turns with the axe, lopping off branches that we might squeeze under or shunt over logs; climbing with our stores and boats over great log-drifts held by the grip of the rocky defiles; wading through shoals and dragging our canoes through mud and sand; plunging suddenly into holes that engulfed us to our armpits; paddling astride our decks over pools too deep for wading; chopping and wrenching logs that forbade other means of passage; fighting inch by inch up plunging gorges, down which and over whose