OF THE POLAR SEA 



175 



to compromise, with the loss of property, for the safety of their 

 persons, and astride upon ill-balanced rafts with which they struggled 

 to be uppermost, exhibited a ludicrous picture of distress. Happy 

 were those who could patch up an old canoe, though obliged to bear 

 it half the way on their shoulders, through miry bogs and inter- 

 woven willows. But the veteran trader, wedged in a box of skin, 

 with his wife, children, dogs, and furs, wheeled triumphantly through 

 the current, and deposited his heterogeneous cargo safely on the 

 shore. The woods re-echoed with the return of their exiled tenants. 

 An hundred tribes as gaily dressed as any burnished natives of the 

 south, greeted our eyes in our accustomed walks, and their voices, 

 though unmusical, were the sweetest that ever saluted our ears. 



From the 19th to the 26th the snow once more blighted the resus- 

 citating verdure, but a single day was sufficient to remove it. On 

 the 28th the Saskatchawan swept away the ice which had adhered 

 to its banks, and the next day a boat came down from Carlton 

 House with provisions. We received such accounts of the state of 

 vegetation at that place, that Dr. Richardson determined to visit it, 

 in order to collect botanical specimens, as the period at which the 

 ice was expected to admit of the continuation of our journey was 

 still distant. Accordingly he embarked on the 1 st of May. 



In the course of the month the ice gradually wore away from the 

 south side of the lake, but the great mass of it still hung to the 

 north side with some snow visible on its surface. By the 2 1 st the 

 elevated grounds were perfectly dry, and teeming with the fragrant 

 offspring of the season. When the snow melted, the earth was 

 covered with the fallen leaves of the last year, and already it was 

 green with the strawberry plant, and the bursting buds of the 

 gooseberry, raspberry, and rose bushes, soon variegated by the rose 

 and the blossoms of the choke cherry. The gifts of nature are dis- 

 regarded and undervalued till they are withdrawn, and in the 

 hideous regions of the Arctic Zone, she would make a convert of 



