and signs, whether it were possible to kindle a fire. Rain was falling in torrents, the trees were dripping, and the grass and fallen leaves resembled a soaked sponge. But Kineesè set to work in Indian fashion, hunted out a pine-knot, such as are of common occurrence in the Canadian forest, where the tree itself has rotted away and left the cores of its oldest branches like pins of iron. Having secured this, and a piece of half-burned wood from under the remains of an old camp-fire, he next stripped off the bark from the lee-side of a birch tree, and collecting a heap of the dry inner bark, thin as paper, he carefully disposed it under a cover of pine-bark, and placed over all a pile of chips cut with his axe from the centre of a pine log. All being now ready, he frayed a handful of the birch-bark into the consistency of tow, and placing this on the charred wood, he made the hard point of the pine-knot revolve in the wood by means of a cord, while his bent position, pressing the other end to his breast, protected it from the rain. In a surprisingly short time he blew the tinder into a flame, applied it to the pile he had prepared, and nursing this with chips and dry twigs, we were able to welcome our companions to a blazing log fire, kindled under circumstances which, even with the aid of flint and steel, would have seemed impossible to the European woodsman. The knowledge of this simple process, however acquired, constitutes perhaps the oldest of all human traditions relating to the arts of life. A mode of obtaining fire nearly equivalent to that of flint and steel has already been referred to as in use both among the Fuegians and Esquimaux; but the process of friction is also resorted to by the latter, and with slight variations in the application of the principle, it appears to be the recognised Indian mode of procuring fire. Among all the Indian tribes not only was a certain superstitious sanctity attached to fire, but they looked with distrust on the novel methods employed by Europeans for its production. When, in 1811, Elksatowa, the prophet of the Wabash,—a brother of Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior,—was exhorting his tribe to resist the deadly encroachments of the white man, he concluded one of his eloquent warnings by exclaiming: “Throw away your fire-steels, and awaken the sleeping flame as your fathers did before you; fling away your wrought coverings, and put on skins won for yourselves as was their wont, if you would escape the anger of the Great Spirit.” Nor is there wanting among many Indians a conviction that the Ishkodaiwaubo, or fire-liquid, is a malignant form of the same mysterious element; an evil medicine wrought for their destruction by the white Manitou.