"Then we went to sleep, and, after having lain an hour or so on one side, someone would cry--'Spoon!' the order to turn to the other, which was often a disagreeable one if a spike of tree root or such substance stuck up beneath ribs. Reclining thus like a parcel of spoons, our feet to the fire, we have found the hair of our heads often frozen to the place where we lay. For several days together did we lie in these wild places. In Dow's great swamp, one of the most dismal places in the wilderness, did five Irishmen, two Englishmen, two Americans, one Frenchman, and one Scotchman, hold their merry Christmas in 1826, or rather forgot to hold it at all." "Do you remember your experiences in prospecting for iron ore in the mountains?" asked the Chief, who was one of Mac's warmest friends and admirers. "I had been in Canada only a few months," he said, "when I happened to hear from various sources that mountains of iron ore existed in the range north of Hull, and the Chief, MacKay, Colonel By, and I secured a guide, and took our way on horseback through the forest to inspect the said ore bed that had hindered the magnetic needle of many a surveyor's compass from traversing properly. We mounted at the Columbian hotel and away we went, our guide having provisions, axes, hammers, etc., in a bag on the saddle with him. Having cantered away several miles through cleared land, we began to enter the wilderness, and, as I am no great horseman, I soon found my eyes and nose beginning to be scratched off from the brushwood lashing and rubbing against them, and soon, alas! I found myself comfortably landed on my back on the trunk of an old tree that had fallen many years ago. "On looking round I saw my quiet pony thinking for a wonder what had become of me, one of his forefeet having trod out the crown of a good new thirty shilling hat I had bought in London. "My companions gathered round, but could not prevail on me to mount again; the guide led the horse, and I trudged along on foot. Getting rather weary, however, and seeing the comparatively easy manner in which my friends got along, in spite of the thick brushwood and old trees that lay stretched over one another at all angles, I mounted again, but soon found it almost impossible to follow my companions without getting myself bruised in all quarters, and possibly some of my bones broken. "They had got about one hundred yards before me, and halloed to me to follow. I exerted myself to the utmost, but one of my legs getting into the cleft of a small tree, I was thrown off the horse's back and left among the briars again. Bawling out, they waited until I came up. None of them but Mr. MacKay, as good a Scotchman as lives, laughed, and I was almost inclined to fling my boot at him. Being a good horseman, and used to the rough roads of Canada, he could keep his seat in the saddle in a way, but the skin of his legs was partly peeled like my own, and his clothes torn in various places.