this great stretch of 400 miles and reaching at last the Red River Settlement. I saw in it still more the prospect of joining at no very distant time the expeditionary force itself, after I had run the gauntlet of M. Riel and his associates, and although many obstacles yet remained to be overcome, and distances vast and wild had to be covered before that hope could be realized, still the prospect of immediate movement overcame every perspective difficulty; and glad indeed I was when from the top of a well-horsed stage I saw the wooden houses of St. Cloud disappear beneath the prairie behind me, and I bade good-bye for many a day to the valley of the Mississippi, CHAPTER SEVEN. North Minnesota--A beautiful Land--Rival Savages-Abercrombie--News from the North-Plans--A Lonely Shanty--The Red River--Prairies--Sunset-- Mosquitoes--Going North--A Mosquito Night--A Thunder-storm--A Prussian-- Dakota--I ride for it--The Steamer "International"--Pembina. The stage-coach takes three days to run from St. Cloud to Fort Abercrombie, about 180 miles. The road was tolerably good, and many portions of the country were very beautiful to look at. On the second day one reaches the height of land between the Mississippi and Red Rivers, a region abounding in clear crystal lakes of every size and shape, the old home of the great Sioux nation, the true Minnesota of their dreams. Minnesota ("sky-coloured water"), how aptly did it describe that home which was no longer theirs! They have left it for ever; the Norwegian and the Swede now call it theirs, and nothing remains of the red man save these sounding names of lake and river which long years ago he gave them. Along the margins of these lakes many comfortable dwellings nestle amongst oak openings and glades, and hill and valley are golden in summer with fields of wheat and corn, and little towns are springing up where twenty years ago the Sioux lodge-poles were the only signs of habitation; but one cannot look on this transformation without feeling, with Longfellow, the terrible surge of the white man, "whose breath, like the blast of the east wind, drifts evermore to the west the scanty smoke of the wigwams." What savages, too, are they, the successors of the old race--savages! not less barbarous because they do not scalp, or war-dance, or go out to meet the Ojibbeway in the woods or the Assineboine in the plains. We had passed a beautiful sheet of water called Lake Osakis, and reached another lake not less lovely, the name of which I did not know. "What is the name of this place?" I asked the driver who had stopped to water his horses.