Personal association with Mr. Robertson was not only a delight, but an education. He had been everywhere, and knew everything. He was charming in conversation and magnificent in hospitality, and the unique nature of his entertainment under his savage environments lent an additional charm to the situation. He soon became aware that we needed something exciting to sustain us in our enforced imprisonment, and he produced fiddlers and half-breed women for dancing. He gave us every day a dinner party composed of viands unknown outside of the frontier of North America. One day we would have the tail of the beaver, always regarded as a great delicacy on the border; the next, the paws of the bear soused, which, when served on a white dish, very much resembled the foot of a negro, but were good; then, again, roasted muskrat, which in the winter is as delicate as a young chicken; then fricasseed skunk, which, in season, is free from all offensive odor, and extremely delicate,--all served with _le riz sauvage_. In fact, he exhausted the resources of the country to make us happy. But Robertson's menu was the least part of it. Every evening he would assemble us, and read Shakespeare and the poetry of Burns to us. I never understood or enjoyed Burns until I heard it read and expounded by Robertson. The time passed in this pleasant fashion until we commenced to think we were "snowed in" for the winter, and I began to devise ways and means for getting out. I had to get out; but how, was the question. To cross the prairie was not to be thought of; we could not get an Indian to venture over it on snowshoes, let alone driving over it. Nothing had been heard of us below, and, as we learned afterwards, the St. Paul papers had published an account of our all being frozen to death, with full details of Andrew Myrick being found dead in his sleigh, with the lines in his hands and his horses standing stiff before him. I decided that an expedition might work its way through on the river bottoms, and we could follow in its trail. So I sent out a party with several heavy sleds, loaded with hay, and each drawn by four or five yoke of oxen to beat a track. They returned after several days' absence, and reported that the thing was impossible, and they could not get through. I then called for volunteers, and the French Canadians came to the front. I allowed them to organize their own expedition. They took their fiddles with them, and the agreement was, that if we didn't hear from them in five days, we were to consider that they were through, and we could follow. The days passed one after the other, and at the expiration of the time, we all started, and laboriously followed the trail they had beaten. We noticed their camps from day to day, and saw that they had not been distressed, and found them, at the end of the journey, as jolly as such people always are, whether in sunshine or storm. It is much more agreeable to write about blizzards than to encounter them.