Once I managed to escape through the pickets at the back of the fort, and stealthily reaching the beach, under cover of the trees, imagined myself safe. A light misty rain fell thickly, and a flock of sanderlings, running along in the ripple, completely absorbed my attention. I was suddenly startled by hearing the ‘crunch, crunch’ of a foot in the shingle behind me. I had looked right and left on reaching the beach, but not a trace of Indian was visible. Turning suddenly round, you can picture my surprise at finding myself face to face with a savage, unclad from head to heel, carrying—what should you imagine?—not a scalping-knife, or a war-club, or bow or spear or gory scalp: it was an immense green gingham umbrella, a thoroughbred ‘Gamp,’ with horn crook, battered brass ferule, furled with a ring such as curtains are hung on. He politely offered me a part, and scarcely deeming it safe to refuse, I paraded the beach, linked arm-in-arm with the ugliest specimen of humanity eyes ever beheld. I wonder if, before or since, a naked savage and civilised man ever walked together on the sea-beach, listening to ‘what the wild waves were saying,’ sheltered from the rain by a green gingham umbrella! I trow not. I should have been no more astonished at seeing a seal, or old Neptune himself, with an umbrella, than I was at a naked Indian so protected on the beach at Fort Rupert. This was not my only adventure whilst staying at the fort. The beach runs out very flat for a long distance seaward; the rocks appear a slaty kind of shingle, with seams of coal cropping out in every direction. The pines (_Abies Douglassii_) grow down to highwater-mark, attaining a height of 250 feet and over, straight as a flagstaff. On the branches are placed quaint-looking affairs, that you discover, on inquiry, to be coffins; but how the friends of the departed get the boxes up into the trees, or how they keep them there when they are up, is more than I can tell. The coffin is usually an old canoe, lashed round and round, like an Egyptian mummy-case, with the inner bark of the cedar-tree; but of this, and other singular customs, I shall have to speak more at length in a future chapter.