Near Houghton, Mr. Forster showed me the surface of a hill, four hundred feet above the lake, which had been made perfectly smooth by the action of the drift passing over it. At another part where the rock was exposed we counted fifty-seven grooves over a space of sixty-seven feet of surface. Judging from the direction of the groovings on the Kee-wai-wona promontory and the iron hills of Michigan, the boulders appear to have been carried from Labrador. [Illustration: CHIPPEWA CHIEF. (WEST OF LAKE SUPERIOR.)] The waters and floating icebergs must have swept over this country with much force for in many places the pressure exerted seems to have been enormous. On my way south from this land, which contained so much that attracted attention, I visited the reservation of the Oneidas, at the spot where the council fire of that tribe was originally established, near Lake Ontario. I was received by the hereditary chief of that tribe, who was named Beech-tree. As he could not speak a word of English, our conversation was carried on with the assistance of his grandson, who acted as interpreter. Beech-tree was a large, broad shouldered man, with a remarkably massive head. If I had met him in the north of China, I should have taken him for a Manchu Tartar. His hair was very long and black, and tinged with grey. He told his grandson to say that he was proud of his unmixed descent from the ancient chiefs of his nation, which had once been powerful, and that the land upon which we stood belonged by right to the Oneidas, and was the place where they held their great councils and decided upon questions of war or peace. After having made, with assumed dignity, this brief oration, Beech-tree retired into the interior of his hut, and I returned to my country cart, which had conveyed me to his territory, and finally reached the shores of Lake Erie. After traversing Lakes Huron and Michigan, I proceeded to the banks of the Ohio river, with the purpose of making expeditions to the works of the Mound Builders. Before quitting the Oneida reservation, I made inquiries about a man named Williams, concerning whom I had heard, when at Boston, a strange and romantic story. It appears that Williams, whose parentage was uncertain or unknown, was sent early in the present century from the Indian village of St. Régis, to act as a missionary among the Oneidas. Some years later, rumours were spread to the effect that he was the true Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI. These rumours were stated to be based upon grounds which warranted a fair degree of belief. The story as told to me at Oneida was that Williams was supposed to have been born at St. Régis (a picturesque village reservation on the South bank of the St. Lawrence, and which, at the time that I saw it, contained a population of fifteen hundred Iroquois, the majority of whom were half-breeds).